The Hollywood Reporter

Part parable, part wild west shoot-out, yet totally original, Dear Wendy is a powerful indictment of American gun culture.

Film Threat

The film is challenging and consistently interesting, but also trite and overbearing to the extent that it damages its message.

Time by Richard Corliss

Von Trier has a tendency to go overboard in his denunciations of American violence (Dogville). By contrast, Dear Wendy is a cogent, comprehensive take on the land and the films that obsess him.

L.A. Weekly by Scott Foundas

Starts out as an inspired test case for the continued necessity of the Second Amendment, and only near the end does it lose some of its tightly concentrated focus.

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

Its mad rush to offer shallow takes on every Big American Issue would be offensive if it weren't so misguided. It's almost cute the way Dear Wendy thinks it knows what it's talking about and then just keeps going and going long after it's stopped making sense.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

A tedious exercise in style, intended as a meditation on guns and violence in America but more of a meditation on itself, the kind of meditation that invites the mind to stray.

Variety by Todd McCarthy

Well made but unlikable and dramatically absurd picture.

Village Voice by Jessica Winter

Especially in the climactic, clumsily staged gunfight, the prevailing mode is wide-eyed idiocy--which might be the point, since von Trier's satirical target is the hypocrisy of (news flash!) America's eagerness to enforce stability and security with all guns blazing.

Chicago Tribune

It's a long slog, not because what the film says is provocative but because the technique is as slack as the writing.

The New York Times by Dana Stevens

The story is laughably incoherent, which would be less bothersome if the movie were not also so unremittingly pretentious.