Recensioni de* critic*

Filmmaking might be a natural sidestep for fashion designers — as Tom Ford has twice proven, though he had the foresight to use strong novels as building blocks — but "Woodshock" is a painterly bore. At their most basic level, movies are supposed to actually move; this one is as becalmed as its perpetually high heroine.

It might gain some commercial traction from Kirsten Dunst's presence as the psychically unravelling protagonist, but otherwise it's an ill-fitting, awkwardly stitched confection that looks likely to go back among the mothballs after its Venice festival airing in the sidebar Cinema Nel Giardino section.

It's atmospheric, to be sure, and suggests the sisters (as well as MVP cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg) do have promise as visual stylists. But the film tiptoes around its slender story as if fearful of disturbing its slumber, and falls prey to chief problem with dreamlike storytelling: other people's dreams are dull.

You can only ask "what am I missing" for so long until you conclude there really is not much "there" there... [The Mulleavys'] movie compelled my consciousness to set aside all the "we should be kind" notions that the viewing of "The Leisure Seeker" instilled in me, and replaced them with an observation I once made about another movie by first time filmmakers who got their break via a side road. That is, that "Woodshock" is the sort of thing that gives dilettantism a bad name.