60
A fitfully engaging effort that is most successful as a performance piece for actors Kat Dennings and Reece Thompson.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
40
Daydream is decently acted, overwritten, slickly shot, decked out with the requisite indie soundtrack, and propped up with angst-ridden poses and pouting lips. It's also another film in which on-screen teens, especially the nubile femme fatale at the center, are but vessels to showcase the screenwriter's irony-drenched, self-satisfied intellect.
70
Charged with alternating currents of teen angst, sardonic wit, nervous dread and impudent sensuality, Daydream Nation suggests "Juno" as reimagined by David Lynch, or a funnier, sunnier "Donnie Darko."
60
New York Daily News by Joe Neumaier
Writer-director Michael Goldbach fills the story with too many distractions, but Dennings, known for "Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist," is feline and fun.
50
It's a film about teen angst that's too caught up in its characters' state of mind to see its way through to the other side.
75
Toggling between the tonalities of "Donnie Darko," "Ghost World" and the collected works of David Lynch, the blackly witty Daydream Nation takes its title from a Sonic Youth album.
20
Michael Goldbach's pretentious take on identity development is woefully lacking in either subversive humor or genuine pathos; the overwrought end-of-the-world backdrop of a rampaging serial killer and a toxic industrial fire only poisons the concoction further.
80
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Daydream Nation hopscotches forward and backward and in and out of the surreal; its abrupt tangents are announced by chapter headings. In the most complicated sequence the film tracks three characters simultaneously. The cinematography is darkly lush in an ominous "Twin Peaks" mode.