Rebel in the Rye

"Too phony to love."

"This thanklessly watchable film... like any cliched writing, deserves rejection."

"A watchable but shallow take on creativity..."

"(A) superficial cliche factory..."

"While Rebel in the Rye isn’t quite as bad as its pile-of-bricks-clunky title suggests, it’s both simple- and literal-minded..."

"(A) polished but cliche-festooned biopic..."

"The journey of J.D. Salinger from young wiseacre to world-celebrated author and notorious recluse is absorbingly traced..."

"A feature-length biopic that appears to be comprised of half-realised highlights from a television miniseries."

"(Rebel in the Rye) isn’t terrible; it’s just one of those period films that never catches a spark..."

"You realise the director has bought into the myth along with everyone else, to the point where he thinks the life itself is all the story you need. That's not art, that's worship, and it's what sent J.D. Salinger heading for the hills in the first place."

"As a movie, this Rebel is, as it turns out, terribly by the book."

"Fatally, the movie fails to convey the sympathy and imagination of Salinger's prose - instead characters simply state over and over again how brilliant he is."

"The warmest possible portrait of a chilly personality..."

"A solid, well-acted and basically standard biopic."

"The minutiae of the film's scenes are undermined by a screenplay with details so sparse."

"Yet another cliche-ridden story of the tortured male genius."

"The decision to hustle in montage-style fashion through Salinger’s life reduces the man’s development to facile cause-and-effect relationships."

"Spacey has unsurprisingly been scrubbed from its cover art. The same treatment should have been extended to the film itself."

"Diverting, mildly informative and - to borrow Caulfield's adjective of choice - somewhat phony, heavy as it is on tortured-writer clichés and contrived art-imitates-life parallels."

"Strong ... draws connections between life and art in ways many others have, but finds it hard to conjure his subject's passion for writing."

"Instead of demythologising Salinger, Rebel in the Rye plays like a fan film rather than an honest examination of a complex figure."