Garden State Critic Reviews

A standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film's dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess. Read the full review

This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it's smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail.Read the full review

Certainly Garden State is a very American specimen of debut indie form, its loose, goof-about scenes of comic melancholy reinforced with the glue of quirkiness over cracks in the narrative development.Read the full review

Garden State illuminates a young man's overdue coming of age with unexpected depth and grace. Read the full review

As long as you go into Garden State with reasonable expectations, its capacity to disappoint will be limited. Read the full review

It's a hilarious and heartfelt ode to twentysomething angst. Braff has himself a winner.Read the full review

What the movie lacks -- a big lack, not a fatal lack -- is a compelling character at its center. Everyone in Garden State is fun, skewed, strange and singular.Read the full review

Say this for actors: Too self-centered to be embarrassed, they can be existential heroes of a (moronic) sort.Read the full review

Writer/director Zach Braff has threaded a powerful and intelligent personal story through a genre all too rare today – romantic comedy.Read the full review