Critics reviews

Where Taxi Driver mirrors Travis’s psyche by hurtling toward inevitable violence and then resetting at the end, Light Sleeper meanders, content to unfold as a grimly beautiful mood piece, its tone shaped in equal parts by Michael Been’s schmaltzy, yearning soundtrack and Ed Lachman’s neon-heavy cinematography.

As in Taxi Driver and American Gigolo, Schrader is operating in direct lineage to probably his most important film mentor, Robert Bresson, especially his film Pickpocket (1959). . . . Like the petty thief Michel in Bresson’s film, Schrader has elevated a standard villain, in this case a drug dealer, to a figure in a search for grace and redemption.

Schrader certainly has his finger on the pulse of the times, and the universally strong performances do ample justice to his sensitive ear for dialogue. But the story meanders, and it echoes Taxi Driver and American Gigolo so closely that Schrader is working less than fresh variations on over-familiar themes.

Light Sleeper doesn't belong in any oeuvre. The feeling is personal, introspective, wounded. Willem Dafoe gives a performance of such painful intensity that the story folds around him like the wings of a bat. Paul Schrader avoids mean street mechanics, macho posturing, pretty pastiche.

[Light Sleeper] doesn't have the high style that made Taxi Driver or American Gigolo instant cultural icons - although Schrader shows more than a few traces of Scorsese as his camera creeps... But [the film] does develop powerfully the themes of Schrader's earlier work and will not disappoint his fans.

Despite a steady rise in his craft as both a writer and a director, Paul Schrader is still light years away from his mentor and model, Robert Bresson... But Susan Sarandon is so good as Dafoe’s boss [in Light Sleeper], and the dialogue is so literate for such a familiar story, that there’s a lot to admire—it’s Schrader’s best film.

Light Sleeper represents Schrader at his best, giving us a character we've become familiar with over the years and Schrader's intimate mastery of our fascination with decadence, loss and redemption.

[Light Sleeper] isn’t about plot, it’s about a style of life, and the difficulty of preserving self-respect and playing fair when your income depends on selling people stuff that will make them hate you. In film after film, for year after year, Paul Schrader has been telling this story in one way or another, but never with more humanity than this time.

A thriller with theological underpinnings, “Light Sleeper” is loaded with style: lucid acting, haunting images and a wonderfully ominous score by Michael Been, thrumming like the fuzz tone of fate.

In Light Sleeper, [Schrader] attains a new, fluid emotionalism. The movie is a small but absorbing mood piece... [and it] burns with the feelings of someone who has known the cross-wired ecstasies and agonies of addiction.

At its best, "Light Sleeper" is merely theoretical. Most of the time, though, it is artificial and laughably unbelievable. Even the dark, gritty Manhattan locations don't add authenticity.

A boldly resonant thriller... Schrader is out there again, testing the limits of audience tolerance. Good for him. Buoyed by his questing spirit and Dafoe’s mesmerizing performance, Light Sleeper might just keep you up nights.