Critics reviews

A social and philosophical investigation disguised as a gleefully barbed satire, “The Plagiarists,” directed by Peter Parlow from a script by James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Robin Schavoir, deserves to be the summer’s art house conversation starter.

The Plagiarists isn’t asking why one person would tell a lie, but why another would be so bothered by it—an ambitious line of inquiry for which the film provides more references than concrete answers.

Peter Parlow’s micro-budget The Plagiarists is a concise rebuttal of the idea that all feature films need to be substantial, with a capital S. It’s a curious sliver of a provocation; you may not always feel it gives you a huge deal to engage with while you’re watching it, but it certainly leaves you with plenty to chew over once its 76-minute running time is over.

In a way, The Plagiarists’s credit roll is as crucial to decoding the film’s slippery meaning as any of the material within the film proper—itself something of a formal innovation.

The self-absorption of the protagonists can at times be grating, and at any moment, The Plagiarists threatens to succumb to a feedback loop of its own self-referentiality, but its narrative twists and swerves enable it to avoid this fate, while its formal gambits warrant the close attention of the viewer.

Summoning any number of texts, ideas, and traditions, The Plagiarists offers a hilarious and slyly withering appraisal of our contemporary creative economy.

The film is dead-on in its depiction of an endlessly fractious, mildly nightmarish couple and very funny, both explicitly and subtextually.

The film improves upon reflection, raising, as it does, some knotty questions about originality in art and in life, as well as provocatively positing that even a copy of a copy of a copy has the potential to move hearts and minds.