Reseñas de la crítica

The list of cinematic reference points could go on, but it's not the specificity of these (or others) that matters. Daniel's achievement is recapturing the hot, sultry mood of these movies in his own haunting and beautiful way. It's trashy, exasperating, convoluted, over-the-top, violent, and deliberately provocative. But these charged-up qualities give the film its unique power, and Daniels piles them on as if daring his audience to come to grips with, and move beyond, the excess.

The movie not infrequently hits a frequency that evokes Tennessee Williams out ofJohn Waters. This is pretty unusual and entertaining as far as it goes, but the problem is the extent to which there's anything discernibly noteworthy going on underneath all the luridness.

[This] level of ineptitude isn't common — certainly not in films with big stars like Kidman and Cusack — and it gives The Paperboy an awkward rhythm that could be mistaken for outsider art. But don't be fooled: It's Daniels doing the tango with two left feet.

This rather exhausted, almost maternally head-shaking, yet utterly stoic "oh well" at the depredations of white Southerners may convey its own brand of subversive, car-crash gratification, a clever revisiting of metaphors of animality and deprivation back onto the psyche of the oppressor. But it's not quite enough to make the film worthwhile, and it reveals little of the problems of representation that Daniels means to upend in the first place.

Daniels' film, rendered in almost pornographic detail – no, scratch the "almost" – by cinematographer Roberto Schaefer, is all about the atmosphere, the hum, the throb of white and black bodies roiling and roasting in the Southern heat, the warm splash of Nicole Kidman pee in our jellyfish-burned faces.

Here and there, the movie resembles a Rob Zombie remake of In the Heat of the Night—all zooms, split screens and faint social outrage. Mostly, however, Daniels leaves his pretensions of seriousness at the door. There's something almost satisfying about seeing this leering exploitation artist drop the illusion of nobility and get down and dirty.

When not contriving to get Efron out of his clothes, The Paperboy gropes for familiar movie language of its period setting: Soul music swells up excitedly over a jumble of jerky zooms, befuddling cuts, and spatial vagueness. But sometimes hot messiness has its charms.

As with Daniels's adaptation of the Sapphire novel, the guiding aesthetic (and to some degree, the ethic) of The Paperboy is exploitation: These are films that objectify and fetishize their own schizophrenic style and adolescent excesses. The problem is that the filmmaker brings D-grade craft to these B-movie exertions, making his florid maximalism more entertaining to talk about than endure—despite the best efforts of his ardently slumming A-list cast.

[The Paperboy] is bound to disgust and miff many who take its tabloid-friendly bait. What Daniels constructs is a formally skillful parade of nasty, stupefying indulgences, and it begs to be witnessed, despite being in service of a rather weightless, sidelined narrative. For better or worse, he's managed to deliver one of the year's most unforgettable movies.

This adaptation of Pete Dexter's pulp novel is less a so-bad-it's-great pleasure than the cinematic equivalent of the Hindenburg crash, and that no amount of Matthew McConaughey daringness, drag-queen-ready dialogue or shots of Efron in his tighty-whities can save this movie from its own incoherence.

Now that we're primed for a camp classic, the film just seems dire—poorly paced, uninterested in developing its mystery plot, filled with sophomoric shock effects and overwrought performances.

Daniels doesn't have the directorial chops to even make this pulpy adaptation of Pete Dexter's novel coherent, let alone enjoyable. The convoluted narrative is an admixture of melodramatic tripe and pseudo-political ruminations on lingering racism and homophobia during the late 1960s.