Critics reviews

As Toback and Baldwin seek to raise twenty-five million dollars from sales agents who offer no more than five million and private financiers who turn them down flat, Toback's directorial intuition proves to be spot-on: their self-revealing brave face on humiliation and despair is deeply cinematic. As for the interviews, they're done with skill and insight...

Seduced and Abandoned reminds us that Toback's films, particularly the fictional features, are often simultaneously liberated and marred by a pronounced lack of discipline on the part of their maker. You sense the better films that are eluding the director while recognizing the inspired isolated moments that probably couldn't have been possible in any other context, such as the electric encounter between Mike Tyson and Robert Downey Jr. in Black and White.

A tad indulgent, perhaps, but a very entertaining disquisition all the same.

Toback's purpose is to demonstrate how completely the movie business now rejects personal taste as an arbiter of what films to make – it's all about the money. Problem is that film critics know all this stuff already so it's hard for the film to appear fresh. It is, however, immensely entertaining.

I'd like to tell you this all comes together in a brilliant mosaic, but in fact it's totally incoherent, lurching from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Gosling, for example, relates a couple of fascinating anecdotes about the life of a struggling actor and a working actor, but his insights have zero relevance to anything else in the film... Seduced And Abandoned is fun to watch but maddeningly negligible, to the point where its title becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.