Movie Review for Bug

Summary: A lonely waitress with a tragic past, Agnes rooms in a run-down motel, living in fear of her abusive, recently paroled ex-husband. But when Agnes begins a tentative romance with Peter, an eccentric, nervous drifter, she starts to feel hopeful again--until the first bugs arrive.

                         Reviews of Bug
By Brian Webster of Apollo Guide (8/0)
            Ashley Judd's got guts, and so does William Friedkin, a director who peaked in the early 1970s an...

By Christy Lemire of Associated Press (8/0)
            Whatever unexpected ability [Judd] shows in the early scenes of this paranoid thriller go utterly...

By Steve Davis of Austin Chronicle (8/0)
            Try as it may, Bug never really gets under your skin.

By Wesley Morris of Boston Globe (8/0)
            ...funny and thrilling.

By Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times (8/0)
            ...a work of headlong passion.

By Michael Wilmington of Chicago Tribune (8/0)
            It's a nerve-rending, extremely unpleasant experience but also a compelling one.

                         Reviews of Bug
By Peter Rainer of Christian Science Monitor (8/0)
            I doubt the film will strike much of a chord with anybody, though, except perhaps with deranged e...

By Josh Hurst of Christianity Today (8/0)
            The movie seems made for the express purpose of disorienting its viewers, causing them to sink in...

By Mark Palermo of Coast (Halifax, Nova Scotia) (8/0)
            Friedkin gets political in exposing the value of dependence for people who believe they can depen...

By Cole Smithey of ColeSmithey.com (8/0)
            William Friedkin ratchets up suspense and terror to an almost unbearable level with his adaptatio...

By Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid (8/0)
            This is a crazy, intense creepster of a movie, masterfully directed in great sinking movements. I...

By Edward Douglas of ComingSoon.net (8/0)
            An excruciating affair, like a bad drug trip that never really rises above its off-Broadway roots...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Michael Booth of Denver Post (8/0)
            You leave feeling alive, if severely disturbed, rather than deadened by the unthinking horrors of...

By Matt Stevens of E! Online (8/0)
            Bug has a killer cast and creepy-crawly vibe but gets swatted for staginess and a bloody biza...

By Emanuel Levy of EmanuelLevy.Com (8/0)
            Bug can't decide if it's a woman-in-peril noir thriller or a modernist paranoia saga, so it just ...

By Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly (8/0)
            ...one creepy love story...

By Eric D. Snider of EricDSnider.com (8/0)
            If you can be absorbed in it the way Friedkin intended, you'll find yourself suitably disturbed b...

By Frank Lovece of Film Journal International (8/0)
            A tour de force of acting and directing in this spellbinding exercise from director William Fried...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Don R. Lewis of Film Threat (7/1)
            A nice textbook on how to use the camera in a confined space.

By Jay Antani of filmcritic.com (7/1)
            Face it, folks: watching a pair of lunatics on a hell-bound descent for a hundred minutes is neit...

By Victoria Alexander of FilmsInReview.com (8/0)
            Judd gives her everything to this perfectly crawly psycho-conspiracy movie.

By Brent Simon of FilmStew.com (8/0)
            Where Bug succeeds, in scaled terms of course, is in its intense lead performances.

By Lisa Johnson of FilmStew.com (8/0)
            That’s the essence of the best horror films. They cause you to wonder: Is it all in your head? Is...

By MaryAnn Johanson of Flick Filosopher (8/0)
            Where Bug succeeds, it does so by inducing in you the same kind of on-edge, constant low-level of...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Kamal Al-Solaylee of Globe and Mail (8/0)
            It's one helluva movie that makes Ashley Judd look ugly and demented, while turning Harry Connick...

By Eric Lurio of Greenwich Village Gazette (8/0)
            The final quarter of the film is actually rather bloody, almost living up to the promise of the t...

By Peter Canavese of Groucho Reviews (8/0)
            Its brutal mental and physical outbursts will likely remain the most grueling screen scenes of 20...

By Duane Byrge of Hollywood Reporter (7/1)
            ...smartly and convincingly fleshed out...

By Michael Szymanski of Hollywood.com (8/0)
            [Friedkin] expertly helms this relatively narrow-focused screenplay by playwright Tracy Letts.

By Amy Biancolli of Houston Chronicle (8/0)
            In all ways, Bug is a head-scratcher.

                         Reviews of Bug
By Stax of IGN Movies (8/0)
            Bug is more cerebral than visceral so those expecting a more traditional chiller may be disappoin...

By Liz Braun of Jam! Movies (8/0)
            The movie just puts its big ol' metaphor in your face and hope the actors can drag you along with...

By Ella Taylor of L.A. Weekly (8/0)
            Plays like lousy dinner theater doing its darnedest to give American paranoia a bad name.

By Robert Roten of Laramie Movie Scope (8/0)
            A stagey, talky movie that shares a couple of deadly weaknesses with some other movies based on p...

By Nick Schager of Lessons of Darkness (8/0)
            Friedkin's best film in at least two decades.

By Prairie Miller of Long Island Press (8/0)
            [The audience is] likely to be left scratching their heads, and that wouldn't be from insect bite...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Andy Klein of Los Angeles CityBeat (8/0)
            It's a nasty, nasty piece of work, which wouldn't disqualify it from consideration if it had some...

By Bob Strauss of Los Angeles Daily News (8/0)
            Ew, Bug.

By Carina Chocano of Los Angeles Times (8/0)
            Bug's relentless unpleasantness, which [director] Friedkin bogs us down in instead of crystallizi...

By Luke Y. Thompson of LYTRules.com (8/0)
            This needed to be a more radical adaptation, and it isn't.

By Mark Dujsik of Mark Reviews Movies (8/0)
            A deeply disturbing, claustrophobic look at psychological trauma.

By Pete Hammond of Maxim (8/0)
            Riveting, repulsive and creepy, it takes paranoia to the outer limits in a film that crawls under...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Matt Pais of Metromix.com (8/0)
            Afterwards, most people will be asking, 'What the hell was that?' while still suspecting that the...

By Ken Hanke of Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC) (8/0)
            While I do not for a moment question the film's quality, I am left wondering who its audience is.

By David Edelstein of New York Magazine (8/0)
            Bug, directed by William Friedkin from Tracy Letts’s play, has the feverish compression of live t...

By Kyle Smith of New York Post (8/0)
            Bug buzzes around in random menace for an hour until its third act, when - zzzzzt! - it flies...

By Jeannette Catsoulis of New York Times (8/0)
            With Bug, William Friedkin continues to be more fascinated by the evil inside our heads than the ...

By Jeannette Catsoulis of New York Times (8/0)
            ...an overwrought psychodrama...

                         Reviews of Bug
By John Anderson of Newsday (8/0)
            A fascinating exercise in paranoia and terror that sticks to the brain like intellectual flypaper...

By Michael A. Smith of Nolan's Pop Culture Review (8/0)
            ...you start to wonder what Friedkin has been doing for the past 30 years. From the look of "Bug,...

By Brian Orndorf of OhmyNews.com (7/1)
            Bug is unique in its priorities; a quality Lionsgate should've been eager to celebrate rather tha...

By Frank Swietek of One Guy's Opinion (8/0)
            Though the characters in it might not actually have bugs under their skin, Friedkin's creepy film...

By Nathan Shafer of Onion AV Club (8/0)
            As in The Exorcist, Friedkin establishes a tone of hard-edged, almost documentary-style realism b...

By Cole Haddon of Orlando Weekly (8/0)
            Consider how low Friedkin has fallen when 'doesn’t entirely suck' is a reason to celebrate.

                         Reviews of Bug
By Dennis Schwartz of Ozus' World Movie Reviews (8/0)
            By the second act it has a case of diarrhea of the mouth.

By Jeanne Aufmuth of Palo Alto Weekly (8/0)
            Both Judd and Shannon reach into the void to draw out raw performances that are alternately gripp...

By Cynthia Fuchs of PopMatters (8/0)
            Whether Aggie is herself a product of particular horrors%u2014whether she's watched too much tele...

By Linda Cook of Quad City Times (Davenport, IA) (8/0)
            A perfect film with a limited audience, "Bug" is one of the strangest, most mind-boggling movies ...

By Mark Pfeiffer of Reel Times: Reflections on Cinema (8/0)
            Bug straddles the lines of genre seediness and high art pretension, but it's not enough of a chea...

By Timothy Knight of Reel.com (8/0)
            Bug holds you in its disturbing grip until the genuinely shocking denouement.

                         Reviews of Bug
By Laura Clifford of Reeling Reviews (8/0)
            ...one of those failed experiments that still merits attention, if for no other reason than to se...

By Betty Jo Tucker of ReelTalk Movie Reviews (8/0)
            If movies were only about acting, 'Bug' would win a high recommendation from me. Unfortunately, i...

By James Berardinelli of ReelViews (8/0)
            Bug is creepy and hard to dismiss, but it's not a lot of fun and its weaknesses leave a bitte...

By Jim Lane of Sacramento News & Review (8/0)
            ...has the air of acting class exercises rather than a work of real emotional resonance...

By Mick LaSalle of San Francisco Chronicle (8/0)
            A triumph for Ashley Judd and the director.

By Sean McBride of Sean the Movie Guy (8/0)
            disturbing, but not scary enough to work as a horror film and not deep enough to work as a drama.

                         Reviews of Bug
By William Arnold of Seattle Post-Intelligencer (8/0)
            ...it builds a grisly, masochistic fascination as it powers along.

By Ted Fry of Seattle Times (8/0)
            Bug may not be a big deal, but it is a sublime and remarkably disturbing small deal that pays and...

By Rich Cline of Shadows on the Wall (8/0)
            A remarkably involving film--compelling and revolting in equal measure.

By Ed Gonzalez of Slant Magazine (8/0)
            Whatever has gotten into Friedkin, let's hope it stays in there.

By Dana Stevens of Slate (8/0)
            This is a movie about the dangers of letting love rob you of your reason and cut you off from the...

By Dustin Putman of TheMovieBoy.com (8/0)
            Dishonestly marketed but fascinatingly macabre...Bug is about creepy-crawlies as much as Magnolia...

                         Reviews of Bug
By David Fear of Time Out New York (8/0)
            Friedkin’s ability to ratchet up the tension without losing sight of the play’s human element goe...

By Ken Fox of TV Guide's Movie Guide (8/0)
            William Friedkin and Tracy Letts' adaptation of Letts' stage play is a ludicrous foray into psych...

By Brian Tallerico of UnderGround Online (8/0)
            Ashley Judd gives the kind of fearless, raw performance that you only see a few times a year.

By Claudia Puig of USA Today (8/0)
            Bug won't get under your skin as much as it will assault you with its ghastly claustrophobic ...

By Matthew Turner of ViewLondon (8/0)
            Michael Shannon reprises his role from the stage production and gives an incredibly physical, dee...

By Willie Waffle of WaffleMovies.com (8/0)
            you realize they are just going to keep talking and talking and talking for the whole movie, when...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Daniel M. Kimmel of Worcester Telegram & Gazette (8/0)
            Blame Lions Gate for neither sending this direct to cable or treating it as the art house movie i...

By Susan Granger of www.susangranger.com (8/0)
            Reprehensible, repugnant, pretentious poppycock!

By John Beifuss of Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) (3/5) Login Required (Login Required)
            Overly metaphorical but at least uncompromising -- a surefire crowd-nonpleaser.

By Chris Hewitt (St. Paul) of St. Paul Pioneer Press (3/5) Login Required (Login Required)
            Even when it doesn't quite succeed, it's interesting.

By Annlee Ellingson of Boxoffice Magazine (7/1) No reference
            The result, then, is that little here is psychologically engaging for the viewer. Instead, to wit...

By Devin Faraci of CHUD (7/1) No reference
            Bug is a movie intent on getting under skin in much the same way its protagonists think insects h...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Scott Weinberg of FEARnet (6/2) No reference
            This "smaller" experiment turns out to be William Friedkin's best film in over 20 years.

By Donald Munro of Fresno Bee (6/2) No reference
            Friedkin settles for more gore and less fear. While I give the film points for style and weirdnes...

By James Sanford of James Sanford on Film (7/1) No reference
            All of the actors find the right rhythm... But even the performers' complete commitment can't ent...

By Colin Covert of Minneapolis Star Tribune (4/4) No reference
            A film of excruciating intensity, a psychodrama that infects the imagination.

By Gary Thompson of Philadelphia Daily News (7/1) No reference
            It's a movie that could really bug you.

By Harvey S. Karten of Compuserve (6/2) Not Reachable
            Though it gets to be silly near the end and stagy at all times, there are enough scares and some ...

                         Reviews of Bug
By Mary F. Pols of Contra Costa Times (7/1) Not Reachable
            The film is so freighted down with metaphor that it seems suited for only the most obscure of art...

By Rene Rodriguez of Miami Herald (7/1) Not Reachable
            There's nothing about Bug you'd call pleasant, but this dark, intense picture is the best and mos...

Movie Distributors
Lionsgate

Production Companies
LIFT Productions
DMK Mediafilms International

Movie Studios
Lionsgate