Spring Breakers 2013

Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: Spring Breakers is all surface and sham; it's trash about humpers. Read more

Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies: ... 'Spring Breakers' is a gas to look at and to hear, and it's easily Korine's most successfully sustained work." Read more

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: [Korine] turns his exploration into such a gonzo, outrageously funny party that it takes a while to appreciate that this is more of a horror film than a comedy. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: Surrendering to the Korine paradox has never been more tempting than it is with Spring Breakers, which is lush and exuberant and gives his admittedly brilliant eye its fullest expression to date. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: James Franco's performance alone is worth the price of admission. Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: We're all screwed, Korine seems to be saying. It's very sad - but also kinda sexy. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Korine likes the poetics of transgression, and he trowels on the bad behavior with a heavy but mesmerizing hand. Read more

J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Korine gestures toward social criticism, but essentially this is just an hour and a half of bongs [and] beers... thinly dressed as Natural Born Killers. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Starts out like a salacious, rump-centric and blithely bare-breasted hip-hop video and ends up in the realm of scary and inspired trash. Read more

Tom Charity, CNN.com: An authentically cracked expression of the crazy, conflicting signals bombarding today's teenagers. Read more

Adam Graham, Detroit News: A half hour, four hours, two days after walking away from it you might still flashback to its seductive, neon-lit, dayglow world. Read more

Cary Darling, Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com: A mash-up of last year's teensploitation opus Project X, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers and a Girls Gone Wild video. Read more

Jordan Hoffman, Film.com: It would be easy to dismiss 'Spring Breakers.' Lord I'd like to. Read more

Wesley Morris, Grantland: The movie is too calculated to shock. Korine just wants to be the danger he's warning us about. Read more

David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter: It has hypnotic visual style and a dense, driving soundscape. But it's also too monotonous and thematically empty to be seriously provocative. Read more

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times: The movie is an arty lark of ambiguous entertainment value, pulsing with melancholy. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Having fun has rarely felt this dangerous. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: The film stands, overall, as one of the director's richer provocations ... Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: "Spring Breakers" is so over-the-top, so-overdone, so extreme, it'd turn even a hedonist off sex. Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, NPR: Korine is tap-dancing so fast that it's never really clear exactly what he's up to, but none of it adds up to much in the end. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: Korine manages to make much of the film into a "Natural Born Killers"-style pop patchwork with a videogame-influenced lack of morality. Read more

Lou Lumenick, New York Post: Basically a "Girls Gone Wild'' short artily padded out to feature-length by endlessly repeating the same scenes and lines of dialogue, often three or more times. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: In another movie, these girls would be sex objects. In Spring Breakers, we're all too aware of what lurks under the pretty packaging. Read more

Simon Abrams, Chicago Sun-Times: Korine's latest is a characteristically serious film about inherently ridiculous characters, but it's too montonous to be really thoughtful or funny. Read more

Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times: A candy-colored fever dream is the most unforgettable movie of the year so far. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Spring Breakers, beach-party fluff done as an art film by the reliably bizarre Harmony Korine, is a return to form for Franco. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: Whatever other charges you want to level against "Spring Breakers" - such as incoherence, plotlessness, salaciousness and mind-numbing monotony - it has no lack of high concept. Read more

Peter Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle: What should be infuriating makes sense in the context of the director's twisted cinematic rulebook. Read more

Dana Stevens, Slate: Any irregularity in tone becomes a part of the movie's intentionally rough, imperfect surface-a formal strategy I might find interesting if I could make head or tail of what the movie that's using it is trying to say. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: "Girls Gone Wild" meets "Natural Born Killers" with a chaser of social satire. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: It may be irritating, but "Spring Breakers" is like a sunburn we can't help scratching. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: Neon bright and all raw energy, Spring Breakers is a pulsating paradox of a movie, both a tangerine dream and a cultural reality check, a pop artifact that simultaneously exploits and explores the shallowness of pop artifacts. Read more

Bruce Demara, Toronto Star: Korine's story is a searing indictment of today's hedonistic, nihilistic youth, and his script is loaded with sharp, telling dialogue that exposes the rotten moral cores of its characters. Read more

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: As presented by Korine, this bacchanal has become codified, conformist and utterly repetitive. Are we having fun yet? Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: It's campy and comic at times, but Korine also gives the film a downbeat, melancholic edge, with voiceovers, pointed repetition of dialogue and images, and hallucinatory camera work, sound and editing. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: Spring Breakers is either an inspired satire of the youth movie or the most irresponsible comedy mainstream Hollywood will never make. The bros in your crowd will call it rad -- and radical it is. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: Spring Breakers is an exploitative display of bacchanalian excess, casual sex and rampant nudity that's more tedious than titillating. Read more

Guy Lodge, Variety: Attractively fizzy pic may be a shock to the system for fans of teen queens Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, but remains pretty toothless titillation by its writer-helmer's standards. Read more

Scott Foundas, Village Voice: All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time. Read more

David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Spring Breakers strikes me as another of Korine's calculated punk outrages, a sploog in Disney's direction. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: Once a year, St. Petersburg is awash with thoughtless, unpleasant people making poor decisions. This spring, Korine is one of them. Read more