Minimalist, moody and morose, Lonesome Jim is a minor gem.
Comment
04/11/08
Lonesome Jim (2006)
58 %
Reviews Counted: 84 Fresh: 49 Rotten:35 Average Rating: 6.1/10
Consensus:
Though Lonesome Jim is leavened by sweet, understated humor, it's hard to root for such a morose, self-defeating protagonist.
Rated: 15
Runtime: 87 mins
Theatrical Release: 11-04-2008
Synopsis: With LONESOME JIM, director Steve Buscemi delivers another low-budget gem about small-town American life. Boasting a fresh script courtesy of James C. Strouse, the film begins when 27-year-old Jim (Casey Affleck) returns to his small Indiana town after having failed to make a dent as a... [More]
Genre: Comedies
Starring: Casey Affleck, Liv Tyler, Mary Kay Place, Seymour Cassel, Kevin Corrigan
Reviews
Top Critic
Steve Buscemi's third film as a director is a low key affair delivered with a wry sense of humour.
04/11/08
Top Critic
It's poignant, quietly life-affirming little story that doesn't need to shout. Lonesome Jim's good company.
04/11/08
Though this clash of picket-fenced, down-home values and big city oafishness was handled with a little more delicacy in 2005’s superb ‘Junebug’, Buscemi’s film has lots to say about this fruitful dynamic.
04/11/08
Top Critic Top Critic
It's such a joy to watch that we often forget it's basically about people who have lost the will to live
10/30/05
Has great relevance to the lost adultolescent generation of today ... but it also flounders in its commonplace and too-familiar concept.
09/17/07
A depressing illustration of how even Middle America has ended up marginalized and rudderless in the wake of outsourcing, downsizing and globalization.
06/16/07
As the credits started to roll, I came to a pleasant and all-too-rare moviegoing realization: The smile that had crept across my face during the very first scene had never left.
03/01/07
Its title character is such a lifeless loser, you wish Moonstruck's Cher was around to slap him hard and yell, 'Snap out of it!'
06/02/06
"Lonesome Jim" is worth checking out, if nothing else for the performances and Buscemi's idiosyncratic sense of irony.
05/26/06
Too many movies offer cardboard cutouts of even their primaries, but Jim delivers honest, three-dimensional portraits of each of the major players.
05/19/06
Helped by the precise details of small-town life and laughs generated by circumstances almost everyone can relate to, Lonesome Jim is gratifying because of its nearly cheerful depiction of sorrow, not in spite of it.
05/19/06
Fancies itself a black comedy, but there's only one joke, and it's that dark-cloud-over- Jim's-head thing -- and it wears thin fast.
05/19/06
... the story of Percyesque ex-suicide, a parable about how embracing childish things can be part of growing up.
05/19/06
Affleck plays this as a one-note turn, all dour. What a life-force like Anika would see in him is a mystery.
05/12/06
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