Spring Breakers

Directed by Harmony Korine

(PG-13)

**

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“Spring Breakers looks different depending on how you hold it up to the light,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. When four bored college girls—including two played by former Disney stars Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens—decide to let loose on a Florida spring break, they usher viewers into “such a gonzo, outrageously funny party” that it takes us a while to realize that Harmony Korine’s 90-minute barrage of bikinis, cocaine, and guns is “more a horror film than a comedy.” We’re watching “the pursuit of happiness taken to nihilistic extremes.” Unfortunately, Korine’s approach to all the bacchanalian excess proves to be “more tedious than titillating,” said Claudia Puig in USA Today. “Things perk up” when James Franco checks in, reveling in his role as a drug dealer and self-styled gangsta, but most of the story becomes “a monotonous blur of beer bongs and bare breasts.” Ignore all the highbrow critics who’ll claim that Spring Breakers is intentionally vacuous, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. “Is making something that is pointless as an aesthetic choice somehow superior to doing so because you don’t know better?”