The Canyons

Directed by Paul Schrader

(Not rated)

**

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Lindsay Lohan “burns like a flawed diamond” in this low-budget portrait of a contemporary Hollywood wasteland, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Cast as just another beauty chewed up by California’s dream machine, the 27-year-old former child star seems “both noble and pathetic.” And “whether you view what she does in this movie as great acting or a public meltdown, it’s riveting.” Director Paul Schrader has taken a cynically sleazy Bret Easton Ellis screenplay and turned it into “a tight, diverting piece of work,” said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. Lohan’s Tara lives with a producer boyfriend who regularly uses his cellphone to make porn videos of Tara coupling with strangers he’s recruited online, and actual porn star James Deen proves effective as Tara’s “ice-cold” puppet master. But nothing the actors do can overcome Ellis’s “barely there” script, said Rafer Guzmán in Newsday. These characters do little more than snort coke and fornicate, in “dispiritingly unerotic” fashion. The effect is likely intentional, but it leaves The Canyons feeling “hopelessly clumsy and dull.”