Trance 2013

Manohla Dargis, New York Times: Mr. Boyle is a flamboyant visual stylist with a punk rocker's delight in anarchic jolts. His is a cinema of attraction and repulsion. Read more

Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: I floated in and out of states that included suspense, surprise, delight and shock, all of them adding up to steady-state enjoyment. Read more

Soren Anderson, Seattle Times: [Boyle] leaves it to the audience to try to figure out just what's up, and what's going down, in this sleek psychological puzzler. Read more

Peter Debruge, Variety: Superficial pleasures aside, however, the convoluted script jumps and dodges so often, it soon loses the thread of its own story. Read more

Tasha Robinson, AV Club: Narratively, Trance is questionable, but Boyle and Hodges whisk past all the unlikely developments with enough verve and style to keep audiences from thinking too hard until after they've left the theater. Read more

Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: If you're going to champion style over substance, you'll want Danny Boyle providing the style. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: With "Trance," story becomes just another element in Boyle's commercial pop-Cubism, and the results are nearly fatal. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: For a while, "Trance" had me guessing, and more or less hooked. Then the violence, motivations, double-crosses and fantasy/reality tangles became tedious. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: Boyle loads his movie with so many snazzy effects that we lose sight of what it all means. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Dawson walks through this film with majestic confidence while McAvoy is constantly inches from a full breakdown. And Boyle keeps that tension mesmerizing. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: You get the feeling that Boyle recut the footage so often, and in so many looped combinations, that he began to see links between images that no one in the audience would. Read more

David Ehrlich, Film.com: An insufferable cross between "Inception" and the twisty heist noir of Jean-Pierre Melville, "Trance" is a shapelessly propulsive mess of pop psychology and poor drama. Read more

Wesley Morris, Grantland: Trance is high-order, film noir nonsense that takes Boyle back to the thrillers he made at the start of his career with John Hodge (he wrote Trance, too), like Shallow Grave and Trainspotting, that were preoccupied with the grimy corners of the psyche. Read more

Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: Danny Boyle has great and plainly evident fun adding twists and curves and tunnels and endless style to his modern London noir Trance, but he makes so many left turns that the film turns in on itself rather than going anywhere. Read more

Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times: A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: The plot of Trance is purposely convoluted - you're supposed to get more and more confused as the story unfolds, not always sure if what you're watching is a dream. Read more

John Anderson, Newsday: For much of the film ... Boyle's innate flair as a dramatist and conjurer keeps one clamped to the armrests. Read more

Anthony Lane, New Yorker: The only perceptible purpose of the story is to pay homage to Dawson, and rightly so; her character is a rare blend of she-devil and sculptured deity, rising above the follies of mere men. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: When Boyle finally pulls aside the curtain to show what he's been up to all along, we don't feel as if we've been fairly fooled. We feel as if we've been cheated ... Read more

Stephanie Zacharek, NPR: Boyle may be sleepwalking - speed-sleepwalking, maybe - through Trance. But he's awake and alive when it comes to knowing what his actors can do. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: A frisky, feisty heist flick with brains and charisma, the movie may make a few errors, but they're forgotten in the blink of an eye thanks to all the twists, turns and close shaves. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: This exhilarating brain-twister is a nonstop visual, aural and intellectual delight, steeped in movie conventions and yet fizzing with freshness. It's what happens when film noir goes out to a rave. Read more

Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer: It's an ingeniously built automaton, sexy as hell, and devoid of a heart. Read more

James Berardinelli, ReelViews: The movie is never boring or uninteresting, but I viewed it from a detached perspective, unable to become involved because I didn't really care about any of the three main characters. Read more

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Chicago Sun-Times: Viewers who get hung up on story logic - or prefer movies that feature at least one sympathetic character - will spend much of "Trance"'s 101 minutes gritting their teeth. Read more

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Danny Boyle's trippy, Inception-like thriller is a hypnotic head trip that demands you trust no one. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Boyle is telling us a story of a perfect crime gone awry. But like his protagonist, he's really shifty about it. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: When we awaken from this "Trance," we wish we could have our amnesia back. Read more

Christopher Orr, The Atlantic: Trance is to Danny Boyle more or less as Side Effects was to Steven Soderbergh: an arty spin on a trashy B-movie, engineered to showcase the director's particular gifts. Read more

Rick Groen, Globe and Mail: The story draws us in even through the murk. Read more

Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Danny Boyle seems to have had a blast making Trance. It's a pity he makes it so difficult to share in his joy. Read more

Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: I can't remember the last time I had this much fun having the rug pulled out from under me. Read more

Guy Lodge, Time Out: It's a kick to see Boyle back in lickety-split genre mode. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: The film plays like something Boyle could kick out in his sleep, all his supercool devices listlessly deployed in service of a mediocre wet dream. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: The dreamy unconscious in Trance seems haphazard, frenetic and often meaningless. Read more

Zachary Wigon, Village Voice: Anything goes, which may make all this great fun for the hallucinogenically inclined, but since nothing in these sequences has any lasting consequences, suspense is difficult to amplify. Read more

Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post: I came away wondering whether the headache I left the theater with was such a bad -- or even unintentional -- thing after all. Read more