Thumbsucker Critic Reviews

Mr. Pucci, emerging slowly from behind a stray lock of brown hair, plays Justin's ambiguous transformation with deft understatement. And Mike Mills, who wrote and directed, keeps the film from slipping either into melodrama or facile satire, the two traps into which this genre is most apt to fall.Read the full review

The movie contains many of the usual ingredients of teenage suburban angst tragicomedies, but writer-director Mike Mills, who began with a novel by Walter Kirn, uses actors who can riff.Read the full review

Pucci is an actor to watch: He rides this spellbinder without softening the truths that plague the thumbsucker in all of us.Read the full review

Thumbsucker is true to its nature, and that makes Justin's eventual transformation all the more rewarding.Read the full review

It's a familiar story, but Mills and Pucci treat it as if it were the first time anyone had thought to tell it.Read the full review

Thumbsucker (like "Donnie Darko") is more likely to prosper in the long haul as a home-format cult fave than in its initial arthouse tour. Both offer eccentric humor within a fairly somber overall tone, support-cast surprises, and (to a lesser degree in Thumbsucker) fable-like, hyperreal elements.Read the full review

A gently stirring symphony about emotional transition filled with lovely musical passages and softly nuanced performances.Read the full review

Thumbsucker is a head-scratcher. It's well directed and acted. Yet the story has little emotional pull.Read the full review

The movie and its theme of self-acceptance has an honesty, undercut by occasional preciousness, that makes it worth seeing.Read the full review