Chained for Life's reviews
Media reviews
Roger Ebert
"Chained for Life" is more than a polemic. There's a free-floating absurdist mood established, humorous and self-referential, allowing space for the audience to not just feel, but think. This is no small feat.
Indiewire
As questions of representation swirl around modern cinema with a greater intensity than ever before, Aaron Schimberg?s fascinating, enigmatic ?Chained For Life? provides a remarkable new angle on the discussion...a truly mesmerizing mind trip of a movie sure to leave audiences reeling and pondering its mysteries long after the credits roll.
Los Angeles Times
Anchored by Weixler?s and Pearson?s natural charm, ?Chained for Life? stands up as both a quiet ode to the experimental, dreamlike spirit of moviemaking and a seriocomic corrective to sentimentalized sideshow portrayals.
The Hollywood Reporter
There's always a hint, even if we can't fully see the evidence, that there's more to each person's story, however big their role and even, as suggested by the sublime penultimate shot with its dual ambience of menace and sensitivity, whether they're onscreen or not.
Vanity Fair
Chained for Life?s genius is in its playfulness, and in Schimberg?s vision, lucid but disorienting, insistent that there be no boundary between the movie we?re watching and the movie?movies??his characters are making. Which means there?s no distance between us and the material?minimizing the excuses not to see it for what it is, or, for that matter, the people therein for who they are.