Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor…Parker has done his job beautifully, using the literature of the past to make the present look as strange as it really is.

Jonathan Parker’s adaptation of ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ gets to you. Crispin Glover is an impressive Bartleby… The veterans who round out the cast provide the needed comic relief, especially Glenne Headly as the firm’s hyper-cordial secretary, a sexpot with flawless diction.

…there is a kind of uncompromising, implacable simplicity to ‘Bartleby’ that inspires admiration.

…the old boy’s characters (are) more quick-witted than any English Lit major would have thought possible. Glover and Paymer prove to be an acting duo worthy of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

This movie kicks ass! It’s a genuinely funny picture with a great lead cast and supporting cast.

A shrewd and effective film from a director who understands how to create and sustain a mood. Parker’s choice of angles and shots are consistently right psychologically (and) are informed by a real understanding of Melville’s story.

Paymer treads a fine line between amusing buffoonery and dead-serious befuddlement, between slow-simmering comic rage and profoundly fearful consternation, carrying off the juggling act seemingly effortlessly. Glover is everything the pic needs, and likely very close to what Melville had in mind.

Ambitious, deftly acted…

Parker’s feature adapts Herman Melville’s eerie 1853 novella…with the kind of fidelity to mood and feeling that’s rare among movie adaptations of literary classics…David Paymer steals the show. (Pick of the week)

There’s stroke of genius, and then there’s Stroke of Genius. Brilliant!

Jonathan Parker dares to adapt Melville’s struggle of individual will, setting it in modern dress, and he succeeds stunningly in this hilarious yet deeply touching debut feature.

Crispin Glover’s strangeness is more than convincing–and aptly contextualized by an oddball showboat cast and a theremin-heavy score.

With a small budget and a brilliant team, director/co-writer Jonathan Parker has brought new relevance to Bartleby’s revolt, and converted an office sitcom format into a damning critique of the way many people spend their days.

Imagine what might have happened if Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams had collaborated with Herman Melville, and you have some idea what to expect from this odd but very funny office comedy.

A darkly comic metaphor about an unspecified brand of existential horror…Stylish…dreamy, trippy…unsettling.

Smart, offbeat humor…Bartleby is hard to resist.

This is surely one film that will become an indie cult classic in years to come.

Brilliant ‘Bartleby’ (grade A). This indie gem sparkles. Intelligent and entertaining, clever on so many levels and ultimately posing powerful social questions.

Absolutely beguiling…as nerve racking and hilarious as David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead.’

The neat thing about Jonathan Parker’s modern-day Bartleby is that it brings out all the vaudeville undercurrents in Melville’s dark tale and turns it into a surreal tragi-sitcom for our own era…One of the most gifted supporting players in Hollywood, Paymer at last has a chance to show that the determined squirt he usually plays doesn’t have to be smaller-than-life – that even an unimaginative bureaucrat can say to the universe, “Sir, I exist."