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| PSYCHO (1998) - R
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ReviewScore: 49 out of 100
SBD Star Rating:
by Lew Irwin
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Gus Van Sant's remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho has received the kind of reviews that you'd expect for a film whose producers had decided against screening it for critics in advance. (Van Sant and producer Brian Grazer had said that they had decided against press screenings because that's what Hitchcock had done; Hitchcock's film was also widely panned following its release.) Referring to the near-copying of Hitchcock's film, shot for shot, Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan writes, "It's not a crime against art or nature to do to Psycho what Gus Van Sant has done; it's simply boring, a waste of time and money, and doomed to be the failure it is." Similarly, Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post comments, "Surely the most peculiar film to come from Hollywood since at least The Terror of Tiny Town, the 1938 all-midget western, Gus Van Sant's reiteration of Hitchcock's Psycho never answers its only important question: Why?" The Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington agrees, calling it, "one of the oddest movie homages ever." Likewise, Renée Graham in the Boston Globe refers to it as "less a film than a vague curiosity." But Joel Siegel of ABC's Good Morning, America damns it, commenting, "A shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene, word-for-word remake has never been done before. Probably because it's a stupid idea." But Janet Maslin in the New York Times calls Van Sant's film, "an artful, good-looking remake (a modest term, but it beats plagiarism) that shrewdly revitalizes the aspects of the real Psycho that it follows most faithfully." And Edward Guthmann in the San Francisco Chronicle says that Van Sant "generates tension, salutes Hitchcock and respectfully spoofs him all at the same time." |
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