Running With Scissors Critic Reviews
Metascore®:
Based upon 13 Critic ReviewsHighest Rated
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- Favorite Critics
The surreality is distancing, but authentic, believable performances and a low-key affect keep Running From Scissors from turning shrill.Read the full review
Ms. Bening's precise, pitiless tracing of her character's decline from feisty defiance to pathetic, overmedicated self-delusion gives the film an emotional weight it might not otherwise have.Read the full review
By turns cruel, self-pitying, and mordantly witty, Bening makes living with a delusional psychotic seem like the adventure of a lifetime.Read the full review
There's grace here if the movie were willing to dig for it. Occasionally it does.Read the full review
Too much manic energy runs the movie off the rails.Read the full review
Too outlandish to be fully convincing, this adaptation of the best-selling memoir sacrifices subtlety for broad laughs.Read the full review
This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.Read the full review
A wildly erratic, often annoying but never boring endeavor.Read the full review
Running With Scissors lacks the edge of Augusten Burroughs' best-selling memoir. The result is an inconsistent tragicomedy that attempts to be cut from the same darkly humorous cloth as "American Beauty," but fails.Read the full review
Writer-director Ryan Murphy strives mightily to capture the bracing hilarity, pathos and surreal incident of Burroughs' bestselling memoir, but this rudderless adaptation never gets a firm grip on the author's deadpan tone or episodic narrative style.Read the full review
