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The Cable Guy | Avant-garde filmmaker/artist Matthew Barney gets coaxial in Drawing Restraint 9.

Ed Gonzalez, Slant | “The supermale films of The Cremaster Cycle represent totems to Matthew Barney’s cock. Two years ago, his wife Björk released an album that sounded like a recording of her vaginal farts. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that these two peas in a pod would collaborate (at least for the first time since the making of their daughter Isadora), and it’s scarcely a surprise that the prop-heavy Drawing Restraint 9, is beautiful, maddeningly indigestible, and, finally, impossible to dismiss. The persistent image from Barney’s spooky, narcotic, and sometimes preposterous Cremaster films was the phallus — a constant in a perpetual state of flux. It’s some kind of irony that the very thing that unites the film is the very thing that tears it apart. Of course, given that the film appears to be about the ritual of life and death, perhaps it doesn’t matter what this conceit means as long as it evokes a perpetual state of cookie-cutter creation and destruction. Not only are Björk and Barney two peas in a pretentious pod, but they’re also slabs of sushi inside a bento box. Yummy, right?”

Ed Halter, Village Voice | “Named as part of a series of installations and performances that stretch back to the late 1980s, this 135-minute film isn’t part of the artist’s overhyped Cremaster cycle, but continues in its vein: an unsatisfying marriage of excessive production values with insipid cinematography and flat-footed editing. Showing little of its titular quality, Restraint delivers yet another plodding nonsense-rebus of esoteric symbolism with the profundity of a Bloomingdale’s window display. What Barney does not grasp is that the greatest avant-garde filmmakers astound us by conjuring powerful visions with limited means. Attempting to approximate this kind of poetic cinema with blockbuster production values becomes as absurd an endeavor as writing a haiku with 10,000 syllables.”

Andrew O’Hehir, Salon | “God knows what any of this amounts to, really. But as a series of defined planes and sharply delineated objects — the ship, the Vaseline glob, the ocean, the whales — Drawing Restraint 9 conveys an intense sculptural loveliness with something moving beneath it, maybe a sense of menace. And it’s leavened, like once per hour, with a teeny dash of humor. This isn’t nearly as immediately likable or showy as Cremaster 3, but in a quiet way just as spectacular.”