Nine Songs Critic Reviews

A touching, often poetic, sometimes achingly real snapshot of a brief encounter related almost entirely through the bedroom.Read the full review

9 Songs, for all its failed ambitions and its tinge of sexism, is lovely to watch.Read the full review

It's a smart, provocative idea for a movie. I wish 9 Songs was that movie.Read the full review

As an idea, the film is fascinating, but as an experience it grows tedious; the concerts lack closeups, the sex lacks context, and Antarctica could use a few penguins.Read the full review

Nobody will go to see Michael Winterbottom's sexually explicit, novelty-act drama - a naughty peep show for sobersides, disguised as a nature documentary - to hear the songs; everyone will go to see the shagging, which occupies the majority of the screen time.Read the full review

9 Songs inadvertently proves just how limited experimentation for its own sake can be.Read the full review

Between the performances in the bedroom and on stage, 9 Songs gives off plenty of heat, but the whole project seems half-thought-out and hastily arranged, hampered by butt-ugly DV photography that turn skin tones grimy and make the Brixton scenes look as high-grain as a bowl of Mueslix.Read the full review

Yet for all its ballyhooed candor about sexual matters, it's a surprisingly baffling and opaque film, too artistic to be standard pornography and too zealously focused on being graphic to the exclusion of all else to succeed as drama.Read the full review

Never did sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll seem more shopworn and routine.Read the full review