Cage the director makes as many baffling decisions as Cage the actor, but the effect is significantly less entertaining. Sonny is low-lighted by a full-tilt boogie turn from an impossibly brassy Brenda Blethyn that simply took my "Bleth" away.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 8, 2023

...this film is impossibly white, like Elvis's King Creole. New Orleans is a Black city, but you wouldn't know it from watching Cage's NOLA...

| Dec 9, 2021

This overlooked drama by Nic Cage packs an emotional wallop.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 20, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 21, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 29, 2005

Back to the housewives with ya, and now that Cage has the vanity project out of his system, he can go back to making more movies with Spike Jonze.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 7, 2004

Too defensive and earnest about its topic to be either fun or illuminating.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 17, 2003

Sunk by way too much indulgence of scene-chewing, teeth-gnashing actorliness.

| Jan 6, 2003

It's just plain lurid when it isn't downright silly.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 27, 2002

Actors generally make good actor's directors, but Sonny is a mixed bag in that department.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 27, 2002

Enchanted with low-life tragedy and liberally seasoned with emotional outbursts ... What is sorely missing, however, is the edge of wild, lunatic invention that we associate with Cage's best acting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 27, 2002

There's too much forced drama in this wildly uneven movie, about a young man's battle with his inescapable past and uncertain future in a very shapable but largely unfulfilling present.

| Original Score: C | Dec 27, 2002

Author John Carlen has abstrusely captured that struggle of one man simply trying to be human in nonhuman, vile, circumstances.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 27, 2002

Nicolas Cage isn't the first actor to lead a group of talented friends astray, and this movie won't create a ruffle in what is already an erratic career.

| Dec 27, 2002

Keep your day job, Nicolas Cage. This shockingly inept directorial debut reveals the brooding actor to be a hackneyed helmer.

| Original Score: F | Dec 27, 2002

An instant candidate for worst movie of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 27, 2002

Earnest and tentative even when it aims to shock.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 26, 2002

Franco is an excellent choice for the walled-off but combustible hustler, but he does not give the transcendent performance SONNY needs to overcome gaps in character development and story logic.

| Original Score: B- | Dec 26, 2002

It is as uncompromising as it is nonjudgmental, and makes clear that a prostitute can be as lonely and needy as any of the clients.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 26, 2002

Amid the clich and foreshadowing, Cage manages a degree of casual realism ... that is routinely dynamited by Blethyn.

Full Review | Dec 25, 2002