80
The New York Times by Elvis Mitchell
A heartbreakingly thoughtful minor classic, the work of a genuine and singular artist.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
40
Despite some deadpan, Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real pleasure in the game -- Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.
88
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
"Songs" is a delight. It's a visual feast and often hilarious.
80
Andersson creates a world that's at once surreal and disturbingly familiar; absurd, yet tremendously sad. The haunting score is by ABBA's Benny Andersson.
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Liam Lacey
The film is like an Ingmar Bergman movie as realized by Monty Python: It's seriously gloomy about the loss of spirituality in the world, but at the same time rudely, sometimes hilariously, absurd.
88
A brilliant, absurd collection of vignettes that, in their own idiosyncratic way, sum up the strange horror of life in the new millennium.
100
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
A collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy--the apocalypse as a joke on us.
70
Though the laughs in Songs From The Second Floor tend to stick in the throat, they're also cathartic and oddly comforting, because the world outside the movie theater is bound to look cheerier than the one on the screen.
75
The film is depressive, slow, darkly funny, unyielding in its formal rigor, and unsettlingly beautiful. It's obviously not for everyone, but only because not everyone can meet its stare.
75
A devastating indictment of unbridled greed and materalism, made all the more relevant by the Enron and WorldCom scandals.