The Informers Critic Reviews

Has an air of detachment and sadness, enhanced by the movie's being set a full quarter century ago.Read the full review

If The Informers doesn't sound to you like a pleasant time at the movies, you are right. To repeat: dread, despair and doom. It is often however repulsively fascinating and has been directed by Gregor Jordan as a soap opera from hell, with good sets and costumes.Read the full review

Though The Informers is by no means great--nor wholly true to the vision of Ellis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki--moments sprinkled throughout the film capture Ellis' particular mix of flip yuppie satire and lived-in paranoia better than any big-screen version of his work to date.Read the full review

The film is banal by obvious intent. The only question, as with other Ellis adaptations including "American Psycho," is whether auds will appreciate the aggressively shallow depiction of an aggressively shallow milieu, or mistake the pic's implicit critique for the crime itself.Read the full review

One long wallow in sordidness.Read the full review

The Informers is nihilism for nihilism's sake; a bleak and borderline-unwatchable collage of misanthropes, self-absorbed a**holes, and pathetic weaklings as they struggle to move forward during the early 1980s in Los Angeles.Read the full review

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.Read the full review

Shocking is the fact that three highly regarded actors -- Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and Billy Bob Thornton -- chose to star in this dreadful film.Read the full review

Nearly every time Mr. Jordan, working from a script by Mr. Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, tries for similar effects, he goes badly awry, so that you snicker when the movie is trying to be poignant and groan when it aims to make a joke.Read the full review