Village Voice

An essay on storytelling and spectatorship within When Inanimate Objects Attack schlock - one infused with the haunting aura and disillusionment of a post–"Easy Rider" road movie - Rubber is some kind of miracle.

Village Voice by Karina Longworth

An essay on storytelling and spectatorship within When Inanimate Objects Attack schlock - one infused with the haunting aura and disillusionment of a post–"Easy Rider" road movie - Rubber is some kind of miracle.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

Dupieux's utterly zany slice of narrative subversion transcends that singularly goofy premise to create one of the more bizarre experiments with genre in quite some time.

Portland Oregonian by Shawn Levy

Rubber is engaging, brisk and smart enough that the audience wins, too. It's grand, mindless fun that makes a thoughtful point.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

While it can be seen as an environmental horror movie (if you must), Rubber doesn't dig down but instead merrily rolls on, as Mr. Dupieux plays with narrative and form. In one wonderful cinematic coup the tire spots a crow and shifts toward the bird so that it's framed in the tire hole, an angle that turns the tire into a camera. Point. Click. Explode.

Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele

If you meet the fiendishly deadpan Rubber halfway, its assured mix of cinephile artiness and grindhouse spoof will offer some oddball surprises.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

Picture Monty Python writing an unusually odd "Twilight Zone" episode directed by surrealist Luis Buñuel. Or just empty your mind of all sense: This is Rubber.

NPR by Ian Buckwalter

What sets Dupieux's film apart is its unexpected secondary dimension: an absurdist meta-commentary on cinema itself that hilariously articulates the notion that the movies stop existing the moment we stop watching, like the sound of an unobserved tree falling in the forest.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

Rolls straight over silly, smashing through stupid without stopping and then barreling into a kind of insane comic brilliance without so much as a speed bump to slow it down.

Arizona Republic by Bill Goodykoontz

Maybe Rubber is an homage, maybe it's a statement on horror films and their audiences, maybe it's a total goof.

Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov

It is, in effect, a movie-house meta mirror, warped and weird, strange but true (except when it isn't). It's whatever you want it to be, which doesn't necessarily make it a great movie (although it contains moments of greatness), but it IS – by virtue of its premise alone – boldly unique.

Boxoffice Magazine by Mark Keizer

Where Rubber veers off the road is that for all its giggly moments and meta-whatever, it's never quite funny enough or scary enough.

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

While it's admirably perverse for a "killer-tire movie" to be this snooty, it's about half as clever as it thinks it is.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

To the movie's small credit, there's very little grasping for larger significance: It's a dumb horror film, complete with a sexy female lust object (Kaboom's Mesquida) undraping for a shower scene.

Variety by Leslie Felperin

Neither scary, funny, nor anywhere near as clever as it seems to think it is, picture offers audiences few reasons to want to see it beyond its one-joke premise.

The Hollywood Reporter

With a homicidal tire as the main character, the film isn't scary enough to qualify as horror and not nearly as amusing as a black comedy should be.

Movieline by Stephanie Zacharek

Rubber could have been a modest horror novelty, a wicked, malevolent version of "The Red Balloon."