Eccentric but not too-determinedly-so quasi-comedy in the movie-about-making-a-movie subgenre. Schimberg doesn’t try to disguise his reference points...

| Jan 5, 2023

It's less like a dream than it is a trippy sniff off the fumes of a failed suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning - that's a compliment, by the way!

| Jul 6, 2021

The film works as both an affectionate movie-industry comedy (with references to Franju and 'Freaks') and as a provocative inquiry into the parameters of onscreen 'representation.'

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 22, 2020

Chained is more than a bit of a scathing indictment of Hollywood portrayals of anyone with a disability or who doesn't conform to traditional matinee idol looks...and cinematic mindfuckery to boot.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 25, 2020

[A] character driven film that may feel a bit slow but has a decent pay-off for those it will touch and work for in the end.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 11, 2020

Although this film raised some very important topics, it continued on its journey as a self-reflexive movie within a movie. Independently, this is an interesting risk to take...

| Feb 23, 2020

He's crafted something wholly unique as it navigates the serious and meaningful as deftly as it does the darkly funny and creepy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 20, 2019

For all its laudable ambition, however, it eventually becomes a bit bogged down in its own meta-ingenuity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 11, 2019

Chained for Life is particularly interested in performance as it relates to people with disabilities, films about them and the able-bodied that play them.

| Nov 6, 2019

[A] wonky, charming satire...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 27, 2019

As the male and female leads, Adam Pearson, so good in Under the Skin, and Weixler are fearless, particularly in an intimate love scene between them, their previous conversation about it saying much about what we as viewers are feeling.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 25, 2019

Schimberg and his creative team achieve an intricate blend of fine indie filmmaking, one that is proudly humane towards correct representations on screen.

| Oct 25, 2019

A sharp movie about moviemaking, with welcome surreal touches that are best left unspoiled.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 24, 2019

This low-budget film written and directed by Aaron Schimberg is almost every kind of strange, and yet it has an amiable warmth and an inexhaustible reserve of originality that make it compelling as hell.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 24, 2019

Often funny, consistently bizarre, surprisingly sweet, and resolutely provocative, there is perhaps no other American film released this year that meditates this intensely on what it means to feel seen in film.

| Oct 21, 2019

Never once does Chained ridicule his subjects, whether they're egocentric prima donnas or those with congenital differences: far from urging us to laugh at "the undesirables", Chained invites us to laugh with them.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 21, 2019

It conveys empathy without providing easy answers, pokes fun at beauty standards, and even targets critics making points about the value of people telling their own stories.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 21, 2019

The movie within a movie concept is used effectively to examine our social farsightedness. Add this flick to your watch list!

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 18, 2019

It is an investigation into how history in general, and film history specifically, has perceived people with disfigurements, all done with a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward political correctness, but also genuine heart.

| Oct 18, 2019

Anchored by Weixler's and Pearson's natural charm, "Chained for Life" stands up as both a quiet ode to the experimental, dreamlike spirit of moviemaking and a seriocomic corrective to sentimentalized sideshow portrayals.

| Oct 18, 2019