Big Sur (2013)
Average Rating: 3.9/10
Reviews Counted: 12
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 8
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 2.8/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 2 | Rotten: 4
No consensus yet.
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User Ratings: 618
Movie Info
An adaptation of American literary icon Jack Kerouac's novel of the same name, BIG SUR focuses on a moment in Kerouac's life when, overwhelmed by the success of his opus On the Road and struggling to battle inner demons, he seeks respite in three brief sojourns to a cabin in the small, coastal California town of Big Sur. Michael Polish's film is at once a poetic meditation and a love-letter to the work of an author who defined the Beat Generation. (c) Ketchup
Cast
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Jean-Marc Barr
Jack Kerouac -
Kate Bosworth
Billie -
Josh Lucas
Neal Cassady -
Radha Mitchell
Carolyn Cassady -
Anthony Edwards
Lawrence Ferlinghett... -
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All Critics (12) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (4) | Rotten (8)
With Kerouac declaring that "the only thing that matters is the conceptions in my own mind," we're still left waiting for the filmmaker who can take us there.
Top CriticDon't worry if you don't connect. There's nothing to connect to. The characters are never developed, and nothing ever happens.
A work that accurately expresses the awfulness of narcissistic self-destruction, and nothing else.
You don't have to be a Beat cultist to wonder why these brilliant and transgressive volcanoes of authentic cool are so friggin' boring.
Offers an elegantly muted take on the midlife ennui of Kerouac's autobiographical 1962 novel.
An intuitive approach to this literary classic yields dividends for both style and performance.
It feels like we get closer to the real Kerouac here, the man behind the book, unable to escape its shadow.
Polish's agonizingly dull adaptation of Jack Kerouac's Big Sur unwittingly illustrates why movies continue to be the Beats' Kryptonite.
Nobody's given the opportunity to do much more than brood prettily and occasionally shout carpe diembromides into the pounding surf.
Some of the performances -- Mitchell, Fischler and especially Lucas -- are lively, but Barr never gets under Kerouac's skin to show the pain of an artist who can't hold his life together.
The viewer is informed of a world of chaos, obsession, and irresolution, but has no cinematic means of accessing or understanding it.
Big Sur achieves one of the trickier challenges in cinema, dramatising the inner demons of a character awash in melancholy and addiction.
Audience Reviews for Big Sur
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