Full Frontal (film)

Full Frontal had a limited release in the United States on August 2, 2002, opening in 208 theaters, and earning $739,834 its first weekend.[1] The film was released in the United Kingdom on May 23, 2003, and failed to reach the Top 10.[8]

Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 39% based on reviews from 145 critics. The site's consensus reads: "An [sic] confusing movie made worse by the poor camera work."[9]

Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert called Full Frontal "a film so amateurish that only the professionalism of some of the actors makes it watchable".[10] Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "When a set of pre-shooting guidelines a director came up with for his actors turns out to be cleverer, better written and of considerable more interest than the finished film, that's a bad sign. A very bad sign."[11]

Other critics praised Soderbergh for his experimental approach.[12][13] Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post gave an overall positive review, but wrote, "Full Frontal is a movie about people making movies about movies, and Soderbergh edits so quickly and effortlessly between those layers of reality that a concentrically ordered universe similar to nesting Russian dolls quickly begins to feel more like a hall of mirrors. Watching Full Frontal is a vertiginous, disorienting experience, one that reflects its characters with grotesque, funny and sometimes horrifying exaggeration. No matter how much fun it is to watch – and for hard-core movie fans, it is often enormous fun – there's a certain relief when it stops and we're popped back out to our banal, one-track lives."[14]

USA Today gave the film three out of four stars, recommending it for its "humor and talented cast".[15]

In 2016, Lawrence Garcia wrote in an essay for Mubi that the film’s amateurish filming techniques were precisely Soderbergh’s point, saying Full Frontal "is a film about aesthetics, or more specifically the phoniness of it; that is, it’s concerned mainly with the gulf between an object, its presentation, and interpretation, with the L.A. lifestyle (which includes a neighbor that perpetually wears a Dracula costume) providing the perfect backdrop."[16] Garcia did say the film’s "major flaw is that while individual scenes are often amusing, the film as a whole never quite coheres."[16]

For the 20th anniversary of the film, writer Craig J. Clark noted "the parallels between [the behavior of the character Gus]…and the accusations leveled at executive producer Harvey Weinstein, one of the handful of sexual predators ensnared by the #MeToo movement whose punishment appears to be sticking. What makes the film especially curious as a cultural artifact is Gus is not its only Weinstein stand-in", referring to Garlin’s character, as well.[7]