James Franco continues his aggressive campaign to make everyone hate him, despite his roguish good looks, with a film adaptation of William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying."

| Aug 22, 2018

As I Lay Dying tries to adapt the impossible, but unfortunately it is bested by Faulkner's weighty source material.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 10, 2013

A qualified, perfectly respectable success

| Nov 4, 2013

Both brilliant and maddening

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | Oct 30, 2013

What Franco came up with... is messy, bizarre, muted, and confusing, but it's also heartfelt and personal. It takes more risks than most movies.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 24, 2013

Franco may prove that he has a fresh visual eye, but the highly emotive story is oddly uninvolving.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 18, 2013

Comes across - whether it's Franco's intention or not - as a grossly self-indulgent project that will alienate some of his fan base.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 17, 2013

I don't pretend to have a clue how to adapt William Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" for the screen, but unlike James Franco, I, at least, didn't try.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 11, 2013

As a whole ... "As I Lay Dying" conveys some of Faulkner's themes, and the details of the Bundren family story, with clarity and concision.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 10, 2013

Franco doesn't answer the elemental question posed by any literary adaptation: Why does this movie exist?

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 10, 2013

It remains to be seen whether James Franco can live up to his outsized ambitions.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 10, 2013

James Franco makes his directing debut with this ambitious adaptation of William Faulkner's notoriously downbeat novel. No surprise: it's extremely grim!

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 10, 2013

Like Franco's other directorial efforts, it ends up coming across as an academic art object, somewhere halfway between a graduate thesis and a video installation-interesting, but only in context.

| Original Score: C | Oct 10, 2013

Faulkner fans... need not be up in arms about this version of his Nobel Prize winner.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 9, 2013

The past may never be done with us, but Lord, do we wish Franco was done with our literary heritage.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 8, 2013

Franco adapted a book that often reads like joyless homework into a film that feels the same way.

| Oct 8, 2013

James Franco's readiness in approaching famously abstract source material certainly doesn't translate well into his directorial formalism, or, more appropriately, lack of formalism.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 7, 2013

Whilst undeniably pretty, As I Lay Dying never amounts to the kind of significance its source material, cast and portentous stylings would imply.

| Original Score: 4/10 | Sep 25, 2013

If this isn't a deliberate parody of furiously solemn, self-conscious artistic pretension, it's an accidental one.

| Sep 23, 2013

It is not so much that Franco has butchered Faulkner's novel as he has inflicted a garish blight upon the art of cinema.

| Original Score: D- | May 25, 2013