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Tom Snyder (Movieguide) allows it a few praises: "There are some funny scenes and some touching scenes and some scenes that provide a few insights into human behavior. There's even a reconciliation scene between the writer and his wife. Still, it's mostly just another vague humanist exercise that offers vague humanist answers to contemporary life. Hence, it is just as forgettable and just as pointless as too many of the mainstream movies that studios and filmmakers have been producing these days."

Mainstream critics continued to debate the film's merits. Greg Potter (Vancouver Courier) turns in a clever criticism: "To steal a line from Apocalypse Now, director Steven Soderbergh is out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of acceptable human conduct, and very obviously he has gone insane. There's no other way to explain this mishmashed garble of rambling vignettes, shaggy-dog tales and self-obsessed Gucci-shoe gazing that seemingly takes longer to watch than it did to make (18 days). Though it might be convenient to argue that the serpentine story-within-a-story structure is what makes Full Frontal so challenging, the simple fact is that there is no story to begin with; thus, the film is not so much challenging as chafing."

Next week: Will you be buying Movie Mask software to protect your family from "the bad parts" of movies? Plus: Possession, The Good Girl, Happy Times and Blue Crush.

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46