For a band whose music is suffused with such delicate irony, you'd expect at the very least for there to be a few laughs along the way? There are none. Nothing. Zero.

| Oct 14, 2006

| Original Score: 1/5 | Oct 14, 2006

Fans happy to luxuriate in its artistic indulgence, however, will be swept up in the weird, random, fantastic OutKastness of it all.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 6, 2006

You have to hand it to those OutKast fellas -- even when they make a mess, they do it with style.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2006

You don't have to have a stylistic device in every single shot.

Full Review | Aug 28, 2006

Shakespeare has been quoted many, many times over the past 400 or so years, but never to such empty purpose as in the inchoate, self-indulgent musical drama Idlewild

| Aug 25, 2006

By jumbling genres, fashions, music and locales, and riddling bullets through much of it, Idlewild ends up feeling disjointed and disquieting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 25, 2006

A series of pretty-good pop videos wrapped around a confusing tale of Chitlin' Circuit striving and conniving.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 25, 2006

Comic, dramatic, highly conceptual and all great fun.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 25, 2006

Idlewild comes alive only during the production numbers, which look and feel more like music videos than music as storytelling.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 25, 2006

[The Outkast duo] are, as might be expected, terrific in the musical numbers and painfully self-conscious in the dramatic sequences.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 25, 2006

There's a certain oddness to a movie that casts Paula Patton as a singer only to dub her voice but leaves legends like Ben Vereen and Patti LaBelle in non-musical parts.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 25, 2006

It's basically a series of music videos -- a few quite good -- strung together over two long hours and loosely connected by a weak story line loaded with anachronisms.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 25, 2006

There are moments in Idlewild that resonate with the painful 'if only' of missed opportunity, and more than a few that just make you scratch your head.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Aug 25, 2006

The first film from OutKast iconoclasts Andr Benjamin (Andr 3000) and Antwan A. Patton (Big Boi) has all the wit and creativity of their music videos. And here's the bad news: That makes it at least an hour too long.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 25, 2006

OutKast's much-ballyhooed Prohibition-era musical is a dense, confusing jumble of old-school and new-school, gangster and gangsta, that never pauses long enough to tell a cogent story.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 25, 2006

Idlewild is so eccentric it remains compellingly watchable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 25, 2006

Those who do not succumb to the movie's fantasy will dismiss it as an extended music video. That's not an unfair criticism, but it doesn't make the film any less enjoyable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 25, 2006

Welcome to Church, the speakeasy in the often vivacious, sometimes silly, musical Idlewild.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 25, 2006

Despite some visual sparkle and musical razzle-dazzle, Idlewild is a messy movie.

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 25, 2006