Bug (2007)

Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert is back in the saddle to review Bug, the only other film to brave the juggernaut of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End by premiering this weekend. Ebert heaps praise on the William Friedkin movie, which stars Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, and Harry Connick Jr. The movie, he writes, "begins as an ominous rumble of unease and builds to a shriek," and the two stars "achieve a kind of manic intensity that's frightening not just in itself but because you almost fear for the actors." Tirdad Derakhshani in the Philadelphia Inquirer suggests that the film marks the return of Friedkin -- who has not made a film in more than two years -- "at his horrifying best." Comparing Bug with Friedkin's The Exorcist, Derakhshani comments that "the director has summoned that same form of evil dread." To Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe, it's "funny and thrilling. The comedy and horror are boiled together, and the fatalistic result might be tragedy, sure. But it's a gonzo kind you can laugh at." Several critics imply that the movie may be the categorical alternative to Pirates of the Caribbean. Writes John Anderson in Newsday: "It's a fascinating exercise in paranoia and terror that sticks to the brain like intellectual flypaper: Even viewers who decide they don't like it will find the film as hard to shake off as the insects that plague our two principal characters." Some reviewers who do not like it do their best at shaking it off." Claudia Puig in USA Today comments: "Bug won't get under your skin as much as it will assault you with its ghastly claustrophobic drama and over-the-top performances." Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News spurns it as "a wacky psychological snow job." Kyle Smith in the New York Post is impressed with the first two-thirds of the film, but in the final third, "the audience has a right to expect more than it gets: five-page monologues that amount to acting exercises, and a dramatic dead end."