"It's nothing sex in a movie about nothing people doing nothing in the middle of nowhere for no reason." Nicely put, Joshua Tanzer (offoffoff.com).

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 26, 2019

Mutterings and short clipped dialogues in ellipses may convey reality but are hard on a movie audience.

| Nov 28, 2013

The French picture aims to titillate and shock with its graphic sex and violence, but ultimately it's monotonous and pretentious.

| Original Score: C | Jun 15, 2011

A movie full of surfaces but with exasperatingly little to say

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 6, 2010

Twentynine Palms is another in a string of recent French movies in which the body is no longer sacred, a churning, jerking, oozing machine. But Dumont seems to be working toward human discovery.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 3, 2008

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 4, 2007

Fascinating in the abstract but wearisome in reality.

| Original Score: B | May 4, 2005

The talented filmmaker laid an egg with this one.

| Original Score: C | Nov 16, 2004

It's cheap thrills in an arty package.

| Aug 8, 2004

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 7, 2004

Both the characters and the setting are a bit of a blank here, so it's no surprise the movie is, too.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 20, 2004

A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jul 16, 2004

Muddled.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 18, 2004

French exercise in California crisis and empty existentialism manages to be pointless, dim and brutal all at once.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jun 17, 2004

In Twentynine Palms, writer and director Bruno Dumont takes his cultural revenge on the United States, attacking countless American stereotypes and in the process reinforcing an equal number of cliches about arrogant French auteurs.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 11, 2004

Let's just say that Palms could shock the pants right off of you.

| Original Score: A | Jun 4, 2004

It's alternately monotonous, hot and dramatic, which makes for a peculiar, not entirely unsatisfying atmosphere of neo -- or is that post? -- noir.

| May 28, 2004

[Dumont] forces viewers to question not only what's on the screen, but ultimately, the very nature of reality.

| Original Score: B+ | May 20, 2004

[Brown Bunny] sports the narrative complexity of War and Peace compared with Twentynine Palms.

Full Review | Apr 27, 2004

What Dumont expresses is too guttural and inchoate to even be called despair. It's not there yet, or else it's way past that.

| Original Score: B- | Apr 20, 2004