MOVIE REVIEWS: TERRI

The Sundance 2011 Film Festival hit Terri turns out to be a hit with film critics as well, at least in New York and Los Angeles, where the film opens this weekend. In particular, the performance of the film’s 21-year-old star, Jacob Wysocki (making his film debut), is particularly admired by all of them. “Wysocki carries the film,” writes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. “He’s the embodiment of teenage strength and weakness. By turns tough and soft, serious and silly, needy and self-sufficient.” John Anderson in the Wall Street Journal calls Wysocki’s performance “terrific, touching.” And Christy Lemire writes in the Associated Press that Wysocki “never seems like he’s ‘acting’ during these scenes of adolescent drama. He just is.” Also receiving a high measure of praise is the film’s director, Azazel Jacobs. “What lifts Terri above its peers is not the plight of its protagonist or the film’s sympathy for him,” says A.O. Scott in the New York Times, “but rather the care and craft that the director, Azazel Jacobs, has brought to fairly conventional material.” Kyle Smith in the New York Post dispenses the most criticism of the movie but limits it to the opening (“It takes far too long to get going”) and the close (“It doesn’t have much of an ending.”) However, he writes, in between “it’s a tender little portrait of teen fragility.” Smith has his own favorite in the film, John C. Reilly, playing a high-school principal with, writes Smith, “a dorky bravado that fires up every frame he’s in.”