This exercise in bad taste is the Dawn of the Dead of nymphomania. Never mean-spirited, A Dirty Shame has some big laughs, but it's a one-joke movie that shows its strain well before the finish line.

| Mar 13, 2018

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2006

A genuine cri de couer in the director's long-running battle against the forces of censorship and a banal societal (and cinematic) status quo.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 19, 2004

A welcome reminder that sex is sometimes too ridiculous to take so seriously.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 6, 2004

Makes sex seem the least exciting thing in the world. And that's a dirty shame, indeed.

Full Review | Original Score: F | Sep 30, 2004

... you can have an open mind and hate this movie because I good well hated this movie.

Full Review | Sep 27, 2004

[Waters] hasn't let slick technique take over as has Hollywood, and he retains his radical sensibility and his willingness to go where others haven't.

| Sep 24, 2004

Ray-Ray says it best: 'It's like Noah's Ark around here; there's one of every perversion. Alas, it's all been done.'

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 24, 2004

Finds Waters basking in the wildness of such fun, but the film is also a retreat from his more sophisticated causticity of late. On one hand, it's a victory; on the other, it disappoints.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 24, 2004

More catalog than comedy, a checklist of erotically twisted dysfunctions strung together to fill 89 minutes of chirpy, stylized screen time.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 24, 2004

The obviousness and redundancy of the material take their toll on each of the actors.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 24, 2004

This raucously gritty and high-spirited film could scarcely be bluer in terms of the language, but from Waters it comes as a gust of fresh air.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 24, 2004

Erotic obsession, by definition, is repetitive, but who knew it could get so tedious?

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 24, 2004

Monotonous, repetitive and sometimes wildly wrong in what it hopes is funny.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 24, 2004

A big, lascivious punch line about America's peculiar, embarrassed, hypocritical relationship with sex.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 24, 2004

Though A Dirty Shame is more enjoyable than Waters' last couple of films, that's largely due to the thoroughly demented performances of Ullman and Knoxville.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 24, 2004

It's just that the movie is so gosh-darned, I don't know, cuddly -- in a perverse, John Waters kind of way -- that it's hard not to like.

| Sep 24, 2004

I don't see this movie following Hairspray to become a Tony-award-winning Broadway musical for the whole family. Too bad, because those would be some musical numbers.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 24, 2004

There is something heartening in the way Waters continues to get away with such films.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Sep 24, 2004

Wicked, kinky fun.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 23, 2004