All those disparate elements fail to gel.

| Aug 28, 2018

While Downsizing is not not about the end of human life on earth, it confronts the prospect with minimal sentiment, and uses it to ask questions about what the good life might consist of, here and now.

| Jan 29, 2018

With his latest film, Alexander Payne finds himself teetering uncomfortably atop a high-concept device and wrestling with tonal clashes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 29, 2018

It offers a jumble of barely explored, quarter-baked ideas attached to a laborious plot.

| Jan 25, 2018

It starts out quick, sharp and funny and ends as a solemn and slow-moving leviathan: a movie overwhelmed by its own ecological and human implications ...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 25, 2018

Dare we say that this once admired indie writer-director, who made Exhibition, Sideways and About Schmidt, is developing a humourless streak?

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 24, 2018

It's a state-of-the-nation address by stealth, wry and wide-reaching.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2018

Payne's lm is full of invention, wit, great scenes and big - if not fully realised - intentions. Downsizing may be about a small world, but it is an audacious, out-sized peach of a picture.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 23, 2018

Although not everything about Downsizing is perfect, it proves Alexander Payne's strengths as a visual storyteller and his commitment to social realities.

| Jan 3, 2018

This movie's many issues outweigh its attributes so significantly I can't help but feel like this will go down as one of the year's most frustrating disappointments.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 28, 2017

The film, having launched a sprightly comic conceit, lets it glide away.

| Dec 26, 2017

The poignancy and ambition were there, even if the execution didn't always hit the mark.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 23, 2017

Perhaps its flaws seem greater because the entire enterprise is so bold, imaginative, funny, troubling and daring. You want it to be a masterpiece but it falls a little short.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 22, 2017

It's a movie in which too-muchness ends up being not-enoughness, since the script lacks a vital center.

| Dec 22, 2017

Downsizing never quite goes where you think it's going, and normally, I'd say that's a plus. But confounding expectations only goes so far. You still have to get to a place worth getting to.

| Original Score: C | Dec 22, 2017

Payne's brand of prickly humanism is on full display here; he seems to revel is the notion that it's only when we're uncomfortable that we have any chance at being good.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 22, 2017

If Payne had landed the mix of genres, Downsizing could have been a masterpiece. Spoiler (small print not required): He does not.

| Dec 22, 2017

Very quickly devolves into a bland story about a nondescript khaki-wearing guy who learns to care about the less-fortunate.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 22, 2017

Little people. Big ideas. Massive misfire.

| Original Score: C- | Dec 22, 2017

Downsizing is one of my favorite films this year. I am an unabashed admirer of Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor, because they deal in a commodity that's all too rare: social satire

| Dec 22, 2017