New York Times
"...GERRY seeps into your pores like the wind-whipped sand that stings the faces of these disoriented hikers..." 02/14/2003 p.E13Los Angeles Times
"...A tough, vigorous exercise in cinematic form and pure aesthetics....Meaning is continuously seeping out of these images..." 02/14/2003 p.C4 Entertainment Weekly
"...GERRY is a very slow and beautiful and compelling movie....By the end of the movie, you know that you've been somewhere..." 03/21/2003 p.127 Chicago Sun-Times
"...A movie like this doesn't come along every day..." 02/28/2003 p.29 Sight and Sound
"...Intriguing....The eye reads narrative and meaning into the landscape, photographed coolly by Harris Savides..." 10/01/2003 p.50-1 Film Comment
"The camera movement speaks to a modern condition of disassociation..." 01/01/2004 p.44 San Francisco Examiner 8 of 10
Normally a filmmaker guides your thoughts and feelings through carefully chosen angles and cuts. But without a cut, we're basically left stranded on our own. What do you think about while watching this for so long? Anything, really. But the weariness of the scene weighs on you until the most mundane thoughts take on heavy resonance. Gerry is truly a film that wants its audience to be part of the process instead of just a big ticket-buying, popcorn-munching, machine. Though the film is mostly improvised, Damon shares a "screenplay" credit with both Affleck and Van Sant -- his first since he won his Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting, also directed by Van Sant. But what's surprising about Gerry is how inventive it is as compared to a cuddly audience-pleaser like Good Will Hunting. - Jeff Anderson
Los Angeles Times 8 of 10
There are about five people who are going to dig Gus Van Sant's new film -- and, yeah, well, I'm one of them. A tough, vigorous exercise in cinematic form and pure aesthetics, Gerry is about two guys, played by Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who embark on a wilderness hike in an unidentified desert and promptly lose the trail. For most of the film's 103-minute running time, the two just walk and walk some more; every so often, they sit on the ground and pant. During a moment of despair, one man starts to cry. During another, one attacks the other, trying to choke out the breath that the desert hasn't already stolen. - Manohla Dargis
Chicago Sun-Times 7 of 10
Gerry stars Casey Affleck and Matt Damon as two friends named Gerry who go for a walk in the desert and get lost. There, I've gone and given away the plot. They walk and walk and walk. For a while they talk, and then they walk in silence, and then they stagger, and then they look like those New Yorker cartoons of guys lost in the desert who reach out a desperate hand toward a distant mirage of Jiffy Lube. It would have been too cruel for Van Sant to add Walter Brennan on the sound-track, listenin' to the age-old story of the shiftin', whisperin' sands. - Roger Ebert
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