88
Like classic military comedies from “Catch-22” to “M*A*S*H,” Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation offers its own appealing blend of irreverence and absurdism.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
90
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
Zero Motivation opens as bleak, rebellious comedy but grows into a smart and moving story of entering adulthood.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
Comic subplots are less zany than flatly hopeless, occasionally acting as deflating metaphors for army life.
80
The Guardian by Jordan Hoffman
Zero Motivation is a shot of honesty, in which short-term goals are far more important than larger geo-political ones. Perhaps because they are the only ones over which we have any control.
50
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
Everything looks authentic, at least on the surface, from the desert dust to the messy desks and the sad, barren barracks. The characters, however, are largely cartoons, and their day-to-day exchanges are as vaguely defined as their interior lives.
70
Zero Motivation never stops being sharply funny, and there’s scarcely a hint of didacticism in its depiction of female soldiers who are essentially treated as a secretarial pool, so bored that they have to invent tasks to perform and create melodrama from scratch.
63
Slant Magazine by Nick McCarthy
Zero Motivation is refreshingly casual in the depiction of its female-centric environment, but the freshness of its performances is often compromised by a directorial impulse to reduce the female experience to spiteful girl fights, virginal malaise, and bunk-bed antagonism.
91
An absorbing office saga and diverting dark comedy, Zero Motivation is a surprisingly insightful coming-of-age tale, utilizing the milieu of the military to look at desire, loneliness, identity, fitting in and many aspects of everyday complex female life.
70
Beneath the strings of gags and wisecracks run parallel threads of ruthlessness and hysteria which bring “Motivation” a little closer to “Full Metal Jacket” than “Private Benjamin” as off-screen conflicts invade the closed-in encampment.
75
Melancholy climactic trajectory aside, Zero Motivation is primarily very funny.