For Cinema Scope, Mark Peranson reported from TIFF:
First things first: despite the presence of Selena Gomez and the blonde Disney Channel twins, Spring Breakers is not a commercial film: it is hardcore art house. It’s not even Harmony Korine’s most commercial film, though maybe the many industry experts who have so opined associate boobies with commercialism. Nor is it at all revolutionary. Many things pop out of Spring Breakers along with those boobies, but first and foremost this is Harmony Korine doing late Hou Hsiao-hsien (say, Millennium Mambo and Flowers of Shanghai) via Miami Vice (the TV show and the movie) and Girls Gone Wild (the DVD and the downloadable internet version), and it’s as intriguing but also as problematic as that sounds. The structure is also right of out The Wizard of Oz, or I should say, thanks to the omnipresent vulgarity, Wild at Heart, as Korine’s four DTF heroine escape the glumness of small-town reality by robbing a Chicken Shack, bussing it to Florida, partying hearty, being arrested for drug possession, and eventually entering the last circle of hell when bailed out of jail by James Franco’s Scarface-adoring gangsta, a drug-dealing reprobate named Alien, who here substitutes for Bobby Peru.