While 'Lost River' might not be a model of narrative efficiency, it's got more striking moments and memorable images than a season of studio product.

| May 28, 2016

Everything ... is painfully obvious or patently nonsensical.

| May 14, 2015

Indulgent and movie-like, Lost River is Gosling's weird, let's-do-this-thing folly. If it is a statement, it is one made by borrowing the vivid styles of the actual filmmakers he seems to admire ...

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 24, 2015

Designed to daze and confuse, and succeeding, Ryan Gosling's directorial debut is a stunner in visual terms alone.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 23, 2015

Ryan Gosling is a tremendously talented actor, but he should really leave the storytelling to someone else.

| Original Score: C- | Apr 13, 2015

It's presumably a labour of love, yet it doesn't give you any sense of a personality or imagination behind the camera.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 12, 2015

"Lost River" is one of those weird films that I think some people will absolutely adore, grabbing on to its performances, imagery, and ideas, without really caring that they haven't been stitched together in an interesting enough way.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 10, 2015

"Lost River" is indeed a mess, but it's the best mess possible, an evocative grab-bag of images and moods with a heartfelt sincerity and conflicting impulses of romantic melancholy and hardscrabble hopefulness.

| Apr 9, 2015

Ryan Gosling's directorial debut is a misfiring, wildly self-indulgent affair, but with flickerings of brilliance along the way. Individual sequences play like short films in their own right.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 9, 2015

[Gosling] seems to have dug up some lurid offcuts from a Nicolas Winding Refn movie, and mashed then up with David Lynch and Edward Hopper.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 9, 2015

At heart, "Lost River" is a midnight movie for those ready to find it and go with the flow.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 9, 2015

The movie owes a sizable debt to David Lynch and to Nicolas Winding Refn, who directed Mr. Gosling in "Drive" and "Only God Forgives," but it reveals Mr. Gosling as a filmmaker with a poetic sensibility of his own.

| Apr 9, 2015

Mediocrity, in this instance at least, denotes complacency, and Lost River exhibits on every level a "will-this-do?" quality.

| Apr 9, 2015

Lost River is a film whose reputation precedes it. Viewers have decried it as a mess or lauded it as an artistic achievement ever since it premiered at Cannes 11 months ago. Ultimately, the film is really neither.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 9, 2015

Plays more like a curious, sincere experiment of a promising new storyteller rather than the egotistical self-indulgence of an A-List actor.

| Apr 9, 2015

Where Gosling goes wrong is in the priggish bombast. Instead of Refn and Lynch's self-contained worlds, he attempts Serious Commentary about the American Dream. But the actor shows no understanding of how poverty works.

| Original Score: 20/100 | Apr 9, 2015

The film proves that Gosling has refined taste in movies, and that he's a quick study, but not that he has much to say as an artist. Not yet, anyway.

| Original Score: C+ | Apr 9, 2015

Lost River comes across as the work of a poseur, but it's not that far away from being the striking, left-field cult vision Gosling clearly hoped it would be.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Apr 8, 2015

The story, more a tangle of violent, symbolic gestures, regards economic exploitation with fetishistic, impossibly overdetermined abandon.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 7, 2015

"Lost River" is no misunderstood masterpiece, but at its best it makes you hope Gosling takes what works here and develops it into something stronger next time.

| Apr 7, 2015