“Paquin brings a firecracker intensity to her roll” - Screen International
Since he made his mark with a tremendous debut, You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been absent from the radar. The reason turns out to have been years of acrimonious studio argument over his follow-up project, a post-9/11 New York drama in a world of trauma, rage, blame, overtalking and interrupting. But the resulting movie is stunning: provocative and brilliant, a sprawling neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe, rocket-fuelled by a superbly thin-skinned performance by Anna Paquin. Paquin plays Lisa: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private school, self-absorbed and hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. One day, Lisa takes it into her head to buy a cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes. With a teenager’s disregard for the consequences, she flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible results. Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup, and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch. - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian