Popular reviews

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  Review by siobhan ★★½ 20

  and then lucas cried, “but daddy! if timothée is playing a drug addict this year, i have to play one too!!!!! otherwise A24 might give him the lead in their next coming-of-age movie 😰🤧😰 so write and direct this for me, please! and make sure i get to hit that vape at LEAST 10 times 💨💨”

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★★ 54

  If you truly believe that this film is ridiculous, or dumb, or goofy -- even if you've struggled with addiction yourself as well -- then, speaking frankly, you're not being very helpful to, or supportive of other drug addicts. Because, for some of us, this is our genuine story. Everybody struggles with the disease in disparate ways, and I can personally attest, from experience (and horrible, monstrous memories), that nothing portrayed in this film is laughable or ignorant. It's real & raw to the goddamn bone, and it plays out in my mind like a tear-stained dose of déjà vu. I'm sorry to everyone that I've ever hurt; I miss you dad and, mom, I'm so sorry for everything that I put our family through. I'm so, so fucking sorry.

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  Review by andrea🌹 ★★★★★ 10

  they couldn’t decide whether to cast timothee chalamet or lucas hedges as the skinny white twenty-something recovering drug addict of 2018 so they just decided to do the same movie twice

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  Review by kyle ★★★ 7

  look, i understand there are a plethora of reasons not to love this, but understand the three reasons that i do:

  1) lucas hedges vaping... a lot
  2) julia roberts telling an old white man to die in a mall
  3) lucas hedges and i bumping into each other after the screening outside and us having an intimate but firm handshake whereupon i ask him how it was working with kathryn newton for the third time and when we'll be seeing him move to monterey in big little lies 3 to which he smiles and laughs and our prolonged, shared eye contact melts like vegan butter around us and the next thing i know i look down and there's a ring on my finger and we're married????

  anyways, long story short, ben now blows out my back seven days a week :,)

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  Review by Jay 1

  lucas hedges isnt just aiming for the oscar hes aiming for all 5 nomination slots

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★ 1

  A more nuanced and sobering addiction drama than some viewers might expect from the man responsible for gentle schmaltz like “Dan in Real Life” and “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” Peter Hedges’ “Ben Is Back” is the kind of white, middlebrow, ruthlessly effective look at the opioid epidemic that might inspire Hollywood to better engage with a crisis that’s become inescapable for the rest of the country. But the film is more than a wake-up call writ large. Beneath its overworked plot — and a Julia Roberts performance that toes the line between maternal desperation and movie-screen broadness — this is a tender and knowing story about the salvation that an addict can find within their family, and the…

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  Review by owen ★★★

  julia roberts invented motherhood as far as i know

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ Liam ˊˎ˗ ★★★½

  when lucas hedges cry i cry that’s just how it works

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  Review by matt lynch ★ 15

  Completely absurd, patently offensive, very likely the stupidest and most naively silly drug movie since REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.

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  Review by kevinyang ★★½ 4

  The first half of this is surprisingly good. Roberts is wonderful, the drama is simple but effective, and the script wades through the moral complications at play with an admirable level of nuance. The second half is quite bad. The framing device absolutely ruins the film, introducing an unnecessary set of complications, scenes, and characters to a story that never needed it. Just a questionable, completely misguided midpoint turn that not even Julia Roberts can salvage much from.

  Also, Lucas mentions a "roommate named Timmy" and the irony nearly killed me.

  GRADE: C+

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  Review by closetmonster ★★★★ 4

  beautiful boy: who are you?
  ben is back: i'm you but stronger, and deserves a lot more praise than you received.

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  Review by Sean Baker 17

  Watched on Blu-ray screener