Bold FilmsUPDATE: In an update to its original story, Variety reports that Warner Bros. will be giving Lost River a limited theatrical release and make the film available via digital platforms.
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Better luck next time?
Ryan Gosling's directorial debut, Lost River, will not make it to the big screens in the U.S. Instead Warner Bros. will release the film, which was described as a fantasy drama, via home entertainment in April, Variety reports.
Lost River stars Christina Hendricks, Eva Mendes and Matt Smith. The script, penned by Gosling, centers on a single mother swept into a dark fantasy underworld while her teenage son discovers a secret road leading to an underwater town.
The movie first premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and received mostly negative reviews from the critics. Soon after it screened, many took to Twitter to pan it, with user @Wesley_Morris describing it as, "If a $200 haircut and $900 shades were given lots of money to defecate on Detroit, the result would be Ryan Gosling's directing debut."
Another reviewer seemed to take a more easy-going approach to Gosling's failed film, writing, "Ryan Gosling's Lost River is a conceited clunker - and yet there are great images and mad energy. Review up later #Cannes2014."
Jonathan Romney, another movie reviewer, seemingly didn't find anything worth taking away from Lost River and quickly trashed it on the social media site.
"Ryan Gosling's directing debut: let's see God forgive this...," he wrote.
But the criticisms didn't stop on Twitter. When the critics posted their official reviews, they were pretty ugly.
"Had Terrence Malick and David Lynch somehow conceived an artistic love-child together, only to see it get kidnapped, strangled and repeatedly kicked in the face by Nicolas Winding Refn, the results might look and sound something like Lost River, a risible slab of Detroit gothic that marks an altogether inauspicious writing-directing debut for Ryan Gosling," Variety's Justin Chang wrote.
Time magazine's Richard Corliss didn't think it was any better. He wrote, "Give some credit to Gosling, the Method-hunk star of such indie faves as Half Nelson, Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines, plus Hollywoodier fare like The Notebook, The Ides of March and Crazy, Stupid, Love, for his mad mash up of horror and social statement, crackpot fantasy and Sundance-style meandering. That means it wavers between the stupefying and the obscure, between LOL and WTF."
Should he give directing another chance, we can only hope it sees better results.
(Originally published at Dec. 30, 2014, at 9:30 a.m. PT)