Critics at the Cannes Film Festival attacked "Lost River," the directorial debut of Hollywood star Ryan Gosling, whose filming in Detroit last year generated mucho buzz and many fluttering hearts. 

The film stars Christina Hendricks, Saoirse Ronan, Iain De Caestecker.

In Variety, Justin Change writes:

“Lost” is indeed the operative word for this violent fairy tale about a fractured family trying to survive among the ruins of a city overrun by thugs, sexual predators and other demons, nearly all of them cribbed from the surreal cinematic imaginations of other, vastly more intuitive filmmakers. It’s perversely admirable to the extent that Gosling has certainly put himself out there, sans shame or apology, but train-wreck fascination will go only so far to turn this misguided passion project into an item of even remote commercial interest."

In Time, Richard Corliss says "Lost River" is the most enthusiastically derided entry so far at this year’s Cannes Film Festival:

First came the boos, like an owl symphony, or a cattle crescendo. Then, a smattering of defiant applause. Then, the boos again. The antiphonal response could have gone on all afternoon, with catcalls winning in a landslide, but the critics had other movies to see. Suffice to say that Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut Lost River is the most enthusiastically derided entry so far at this year’s Cannes Film Festival — just edging out Atom Egoyan’s The Captive. Among the Lost River notes jotted by my colleague and better half Mary Corliss, usually a temperate soul, was the phrase “pretentious horseshit.”

In the Telegraph, of London, Robbie Collin calls it "mouth-dryingly lousy:"

The problem is, it’s like everything Ryan Gosling’s seen: David Lynch, Mario Bava, Nicolas Winding Refn, Terence Malick, Gaspar Noé and a splash of David Cronenberg for good measure. But these filmmakers’ ideas and imagery aren’t developed, they’re simply reproduced: think Wikipedia essay rather than love letter. The result is cinema you don’t watch so much as absent-mindedly scroll through, wondering when an idea or an image worth clicking on will finally show up.

In the Guardian, of London, Peter Bradshaw derides the film as "a kind of ruin-porn gothic fantasy."

It is colossally indulgent, shapeless, often fantastically and unthinkingly offensive and at all times insufferably conceited. Yet it is frustrating precisely because it sometimes isn't so bad. There is something in there somewhere - striking images and moments, and the crazy energy of a folie de grandeur.

And at Grantland, Wesley Morris' hard-hitting slam includes this:

Montages of houses, bulldozed and blazed, are frequent. They’re the sort of lovingly photographed images that can only come from someone unaccustomed to the loss they represent. For "Lost River" is not an exploration of the wrongs done to this once great American city — it’s a playground. . . .

The camera’s often looking through or at grime. If you tossed this thing into a washing machine, there’d be nothing left. Every move is borrowed from other directors. . . .

Actors have more to do at Madame Tussauds.

Earlier this week, Deadline Detroit called the "Lost River" trailer a "head-scratcher:"