Although occasionally both overwritten and overly symbolic, tale carries a satisfying emotional charge.

World Traveler did seem completely aimless for the first third. However, once I comprehended where Freundlich was going with this, I began to really enjoy where the film was taking me.

Crudup takes a riskier path: his architect isn't very nice and is possibly irredeemable. His performance is subtle, complicated, and fresh, and it's a shame the movie doesn't live up to it.

Well-made, well-acted but ultimately enervating, this is a respectable effort from Freundlich.

Crudup is the best navigator a road movie like World Traveler can have, but even he can't single-handedly transport these goods from nowhere to somewhere.

A small story, a monodrama with a hero but no antagonists.

The gorgeous Crudup is talented, but this charming asshole (more asshole than charming) is old hat for him, little more than another of the blank-eyed-loser-on-a-spiritual-quest roles in which he's been trafficking lately.

The Crudup of "Almost Famous" was both hairier and more appealing than the tortured womanizer of World Traveler. Couldn't Cal have just stayed home, grown a mustache, and called his dad on the phone? [22 & 29 April 2002, p. 209]

Iridescent as each of the actors is, the result is like a handful of beads without the connecting string.

As beautiful to look at and as emotionally disconnected as its central character.

The film is perhaps best enjoyed as a minor work with some major pluses, notably in the characterizations and in their adroit portrayals.

The real seduction Crudup pulls off is that he makes it seem possible that the character hasn't actually done all of these awful things.

There are moments of sudden truth in the film; Freundlich, who also made "The Myth of Fingerprints" (1997), about an almost heroically depressed family at Thanksgiving, can create and write characters, even if he doesn't always know where to take them.

Limps shallowly along.