Some critics called the movie undisciplined, and that’s exactly what's so cool about it!

| Jun 3, 2024

This is a fabulous disaster. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jan 20, 2023

Perhaps it is a radical break from the elusive entity we have come to label a "gay sensibility" or maybe it is an attempt to redefine it.

| Aug 26, 2022

My Own Private Idaho may be an operatic arraignment of the class divide that continues to bring shame on America, Van Sant's film gleams brightest when Phoenix, with his wobbly, puppy-dog charisma appears on screen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 20, 2020

...a great enough idea that it almost doesn't bother me that these stories don't really illuminate one another.

| May 29, 2020

It misrepresents illness in order to be amusing and Shakespeare in order to seem deep.

| Jul 23, 2018

"My Own Private Idaho" is both a love story and a tragedy. It remains the high point in Gus Van Sant's career.

| Original Score: A+ | Jul 5, 2016

A simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie.

| Jun 2, 2014

Holding all these elements together is Van Sant's sensibility, such an elusive thing it instinctively squirms away from any attempt to pigeonhole it.

| Jun 2, 2014

Although River Phoenix has distinguished himself as an actor ever since his second film, Stand By Me, nothing he has ever done before prepares you for his performance in Private Idaho as the motherless, homeless, loveless piece of human driftwood.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 2, 2014

Cracked and beautiful, stranger than strange, yet in some assuring way so pulsing with life that it embraces you as warmly as Father Knows Best.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 2, 2014

Van Sant proves again that he is masterful at charting the hearts and minds of young people adrift.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 2, 2014

This is a very rich, very sympathetic piece of work.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 2, 2014

[Van Sant] disdain[s] narrative. He got away with Drugstore Cowboy because its band of drugged-out dodoes were engaged in a petty crime spree that almost passed for a plot. But My Own Private Idaho is a different story. Or rather nonstory.

| Jun 2, 2014

One of the most original cinematic talents at work in this country, Van Sant has a knack for pulling disparate elements together and twisting them into wildly funny lyrical odysseys of the mind and heart.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 2, 2014

Audacious, controversial, directional, important and totally unique, you'll either love it or hate it. But see it!

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 2, 2014

American indie god Gus Van Sant's most iconic moment was this giddily rich revisionist road movie-cum-western.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 2, 2014

The two actors create vivid characters, but they're so unsympathetic and Van Sant drags them through so many tiresome, pretentious scenes that it begins to look as if Phoenix's narcolepsy isn't part of the plot.

Full Review | Jun 2, 2014

Written and directed by Gus Van Sant, who mingles tremendous visual imagination with a leaning toward off-the-wall situations and sometimes raunchy images.

| Jun 2, 2014

Director-writer Gus Van Sant sets up disturbing -- and, often, oddly comic -- situations and then gives his characters (and actors) the freedom to explore them.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 2, 2014