Amid the seasonal din of so many raucous summer blockbusters, Noise offers blessed relief in the form of a strong central performance, sharp dialogue and edgy humor.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 18, 2008

How can you resist a hero who gets worked up because a car alarm disrupts his extremely tenuous grasp on a difficult but life altering passage of Hegel?

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 18, 2008

Amusing but marginal.

| Sep 25, 2008

The black comedy Noise may be a one-joke movie but it's a resonant one.

| Original Score: B | May 16, 2008

A tale of obsession and vigilantism cut with humor and a little Hegel, Henry Bean's Noise is a satisfyingly screwy New York story in which a successful businessman/family man jettisons all because he can't stand the cacophony on the street.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 15, 2008

Noise has too many warring genres on the boil and too many thoughts jockeying for supremacy.

Full Review | May 15, 2008

It's wickedly amusing for a little bit, but ultimately the film becomes what it's fighting: just noise.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 15, 2008

A splendidly eccentric independent film written and directed by Henry Bean.

| May 12, 2008

There's an intriguing canvas here, but Bean paints in broad strokes and then just sort of gives up at the end.

Full Review | May 12, 2008

The moral of this failed fable might best be summed up as, "Dude, get some earplugs."

Full Review | May 10, 2008

The movie has enough big-city wickedness and merry cruelty to keep things skittering unpredictably.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 9, 2008

If Noise takes a certain New York path and tries to gently negotiate rather than smash things, Robbins and Hurt at least manage to keep it real.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 9, 2008

Noise, the second part of a projected 'fanatic trilogy', is shallow and loud.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | May 9, 2008

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | May 9, 2008

Noise is never quite as smart as it tries to be. But as summer and its mouth-breathing blockbusters loom large on the horizon, there's something touching about a movie that even tries.

| May 8, 2008

[Director] Bean writes interesting scripts that toy with big ideas, but the films that result aren't always good. (Or even bearable.) Here he sets out to make an aural Fight Club, but instead he's made a movie about a guy who really needs to buy earplugs.

| Original Score: C- | May 8, 2008

As a follow-up to his striking 2002 directorial debut, The Believer, this second obsessive study in fanaticism by writer-director Henry Bean has its own delirious integrity and outsider-art charm.

| Original Score: B | May 7, 2008

Noise is a funny movie about a serious issue, delivered tongue in cheek but with real conviction.

Full Review | May 7, 2008

| Original Score: B | Oct 22, 2007

It kicks off with a wallop, then constantly confounds expectations by approaching its subject matter from fresh directions.

Full Review | Feb 2, 2007