| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Each bend in the road positively screeches with the urgency of impending catharsis, but the film never earns its resolution.

| Aug 8, 2009

The movie seems unusually honest in portraying the no-option existence of the working poor, but the story slips into melodrama in the last reel.

| Dec 8, 2008

It's a film of mood -- and the mood is perfectly captured.

Full Review | Mar 24, 2008

Zac Stanford's screenplay works only as a theorem proving Murphy's Law.

| Original Score: D | Mar 15, 2008

Portentous and dull, the film features one of the worst over-the-top performances by Dennis Hopper, who plays an abusive father. His role upends what could have been a mildly interesting family drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 14, 2008

Saddled with a title all too true to its somnambulist pace, Sleepwalking is a textbook case of a bad movie partially redeemed by good acting.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 14, 2008

Sleepwalking is a slow-moving family drama guaranteed to induce a nap if not somnambulism.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 14, 2008

Beware any movie that ends with a clich as dire as 'Today is the first day of the rest of your life.' What comes before that in Sleepwalking is relentlessly depressing.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 14, 2008

It's no easy task staying awake through Sleepwalking, a downbeat debut from Bill Maher (no, not that one). Only a typically intense performance from co-star Nick Stahl offers the jolt needed to keep us alert.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 14, 2008

Terrific performances and a bleak, riveting look at life on the economic fringes eventually gives way to an overly familiar tale of abuse, denial and catharsis that feels like warmed over Sam Shepard minus the poetry.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 14, 2008

The transparently familiar issues -- abuse, unemployment, parental neglect, promiscuity -- are stapled onto characters who never seem credible.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 14, 2008

Despite its deficiencies, and the inadequate screen time allotted to Theron (who's quite good), Sleepwalking has a core of feeling. It's about a do-gooder who, lacking all skills for it, does good anyway. His emotional odyssey has real poignancy.

| Original Score: B | Mar 14, 2008

The movie seems terrified of true psychological complexity or perversity. It's less a family tragedy than a lousy country dirge.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 14, 2008

Sleepwalking is a frustrating case because Stahl, Robb and Theron all give performances that are subtle, delicate and smart -- it's just that they're steamrollered by the movie's relentlessness.

| Mar 14, 2008

Charlize Theron only gets better as an actress, and she certainly wouldn't sign on to a low-budget indie such as Sleepwalking without believing in the material. The material, alas, does Theron no favors.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Mar 14, 2008

Filmed mostly in winter, in browns, grays and soiled whites, Sleepwalking sustains a mood of unrelenting bleakness, wearing its aesthetic of desolation like a badge of integrity.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 14, 2008

Well-intentioned to a fault, Sleepwalking blurs the line between dramatizing free-floating misery and spreading it.

| Original Score: C | Mar 13, 2008

An inert, sloppily written melodrama as grim and featureless as its frozen Midwestern setting.

| Mar 13, 2008

Relentlessly downbeat, with a glimmer of a payoff in the last couple of scenes, Sleepwalking is a film that has 'indie' written all over it -- for better and for worse.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 13, 2008