Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

First-time director Siegel shows promise. His script is solid, and although the last act feels somewhat awkward, the idea is clever.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 29, 2009

Writer-director Robert D. Siegel grew up listening to callers like Paul on The FAN, New York City's all-sports radio, and he gives us a bizarrely sympathetic portrait of a guy who is as devout and as obsessive as any religious fanatic.

| Nov 22, 2009

It's a classic situation, transplanted to a small, petty arena. When I think of this movie, I think of Oswalt, how his anguish feels real (whether we understand it or not) and how his face unaccountably becomes an offbeat locus of dignity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 23, 2009

Though the movie isn't much to look at, he gets a credibly dark and pathetic performance from the typically comic Oswalt.

| Oct 2, 2009

Oswalt's performance alone makes Big Fan worth seeing.

| Oct 2, 2009

A comedy with dark undertones, it asks: What kind of a man listens to and calls sports talk radio compulsively, even at 2 a.m.? Even out of season? Even on, say, Thanksgiving? He should get a life, do you think?

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 1, 2009

Big Fan, however, sticks to its guns and gives in to none of the sappiness or redemptive qualities of The Wrestler.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 25, 2009

In his first starring role, Oswalt, a stand-up comedian whose trademark persona is part comic-book geek and part frat-house hedonist, inhabits a character who is both painfully familiar and poignantly alone.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 25, 2009

A bleakly funny character study of a very particular species of urban fauna -- the sports radio call-in fanatic -- Big Fan is compulsively watchable.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 18, 2009

Oswalt nails Paul's mix of sadness and devotion, and Siegel gives the whole affair an air of gloom with just the barest hint of satire.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 11, 2009

Big Fan is a poignant, dead-on character study, an examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2009

It's a modest, drab little drama about a psychologically unstable guy living in a sad little corner of America.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2009

[Oswalt] is doing work here he has never done on screen.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2009

Big Fan isn't a touchdown, but its patient torture reminded me of the rest of the world's football: tense stretches of nothing with enough killer moments to cheer.

| Original Score: B | Sep 3, 2009

What's left is a vivid portrait of an exceedingly ordinary man for whom there's no great epiphany or cliched redemption. That may be Siegel's trickiest play of all.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 3, 2009

Robert Siegel, the writer-director of Big Fan, was also the writer of The Wrestler, last year's most overrated movie. In some ways, I like this one more, but it's yet another grunge fest.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 2, 2009

An unblinking look at the hidden (or perhaps not so 
 hidden) pathology of American sports mania, in which the power and victory of your team becomes the sole conduit for your self-worth.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 2, 2009

Superb Noo Yawk attitude, dialogue and performances keep the movie lively and tart, but it also turns out to have a surprising plot with a few twists you won't see coming.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 28, 2009

With its unremittingly bleak humor and eagerness to plumb the depths of fanboy abjection, Big Fan seems destined for a future in the cult canon.

| Aug 28, 2009