"Brief Interviews is interesting in pieces, but overwhelming in its totality." - Andrew Schenker

I thought Jon Krasinski did a decent job considering how incredibly hard the source material actually would be to adapt into a movie. I appreciate Krasinski's use of variety with regard to the "interviews" and not just having them all the same. I thought the parts he wrote himself (tying together the interviews and giving a reason for them) were fine and I was glad he didn't go overboard with it. It wasn't perfect, but I don't know if any other adaptation of this could be done better.

Krasinski's behind-the-camera debut is a good start that mostly suffers from its source material. An interesting enough storyline with fascinating characters there just wasn't enough to flesh into a solid feature. Still can't wait to see what he produces for us next. Quickly becoming one of my favorite actors (go watch Away We Go please).

Just got into DFW, read "a supposedly fun thing..", saw this, and now i'm about to read the book from which this film was adapted. Definitely got me excited about the book, tho like many here say a bit of a student-film project. great scenes here tho, prob worth a watch. but you know what they say, they're never as good as the book.. except Kaufman's "Adaptation" of course

Thanks for ruining one of my favorite books, Jim.

Had to turn it off 20 minutes in. Read the book instead - read all his books for that matter, they are actually very good. If you're going to make a DFW film do Infinite Jest, it would be a failure of course, but at least it could fail in interesting or spectacular fashion. This one was just so plain student-film bad, avoid.

It wasn't the worst movie I ever saw, but I kept waiting for something to happen. Also, breaking up the time line but switching every's hair is goofy

Interesting concept... but without proper execution, can turn to wildly uneven garbage. Look at my score and you get a sense of how I felt about the execution. Pretentious, boring and not even the best interviews can overshadow the rest.

The battle of the sexes monologues aren't terribly interesting for the most part and this seems more like a filmmaking exercise than a film.

Good casting, some good performances, but the editing is all over the place and the narrative is just too epiphanic, too intense, too much "in-yer-face" without a solid ground. Also, I hate cameos, in this case the director-actor giving the final-shakedown-tears-filled performance.

Krasinski certainly didn't settle for an easy assignment in his first outing as a writer-director, choosing to adapt a collection of themed short stories by David Foster Wallace. Almost inevitably, the resulting film is meandering and clumsy. Much of the dialogue--especially that in the interview sessions--is stilted and overly verbose, the sort of thing that may be dandy on the page, but will fell all but the craftiest actors. Despite the thematic unity, the film feels assembled by spare parts.

"Feels like 25 very brief stage plays jammed together -- maybe five of which are worth sitting through."