The Informers | Telescope Film
The Informers

The Informers

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A collection of intersecting short stories set in early 1980s Los Angeles, depicts a week in the lives of an assortment of socially alienated, mainly well-off characters who numb their sense of emptiness with casual sex, violence, and drugs.

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What are critics saying?

63

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

If The Informers doesn't sound to you like a pleasant time at the movies, you are right. To repeat: dread, despair and doom. It is often however repulsively fascinating and has been directed by Gregor Jordan as a soap opera from hell, with good sets and costumes.

58

The A.V. Club by Noel Murray

Though The Informers is by no means great--nor wholly true to the vision of Ellis, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nicholas Jarecki--moments sprinkled throughout the film capture Ellis' particular mix of flip yuppie satire and lived-in paranoia better than any big-screen version of his work to date.

50

Variety

The film is banal by obvious intent. The only question, as with other Ellis adaptations including "American Psycho," is whether auds will appreciate the aggressively shallow depiction of an aggressively shallow milieu, or mistake the pic's implicit critique for the crime itself.

50

The Hollywood Reporter

One long wallow in sordidness.

38

Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

Another tale of Tinseltown drugs, sex and excess - has transferred itself to the screen with mind-boggling, laugh-inciting horribleness.

38

Charlotte Observer

It's a terrible muddle unless you take it as a satire on the Age of Ellis, the Jacqueline Susann for that Flock of Seagulls era. That way, the unintentional laughs seem almost ironic.

38

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

The Informers is nihilism for nihilism's sake; a bleak and borderline-unwatchable collage of misanthropes, self-absorbed a**holes, and pathetic weaklings as they struggle to move forward during the early 1980s in Los Angeles.

25

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.

25

Miami Herald by Connie Ogle

Here's what is bad: this movie.

20

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

A tale of absolute self-absorption and unconscious revelation.