The film was not accepted by the
Sundance Film Festival, but was scheduled for sale in January 2013 by
William Morris Endeavor.
IFC Films bought the rights to distribute the film theatrically, accompanied by a special screening at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (on July 29, 2013) featuring a conversation session with director Paul Schrader and the film critic/New York Film Festival Program Director Kent Jones. It was shown in the out of competition section at the
70th Venice International Film Festival. The film was also featured on the cover of the July/August 2013 (Volume 49/Number 4) issue of
Film Comment Magazine, featuring a full centerpiece article on the film's production. The issue featured an article, by Schrader, on the hardships and merits of working with Lindsay Lohan.
The Canyons was given an R rating for "strong sexual content including graphic nudity, language throughout, a bloody crime scene, and brief drug use".
Critical response Contemporary The
review aggregation website
Rotten Tomatoes reported a 21% approval rating for
The Canyons, based on 95 reviews, with an average score of 4/10. The site's consensus says the film "serves as a sour footnote in Paul Schrader's career—but it does feature some decent late-period work from Lindsay Lohan". At
Metacritic, which assigns a
weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 36, based on 30 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Linda Barnard of the
Toronto Star gave the film one out of four stars, calling it "a howlingly bad soap-opera-meets-soft-core-porn mash-up". Writing for
The Village Voice,
Stephanie Zacharek praised Lohan's performance, likening her Tara character to "a nectarine on the far side of ripening, and this isn't a story about innocence lost—she sold that off long ago. But there's a dreaminess about her that could never crystallize into hardness." Zacharek also wrote that the "nuts and bolts of the plot are the least interesting things" about the film. While the negative response to the film was overwhelming,
The Canyons also received some praise. In a glowing review,
Richard Brody wrote in
The New Yorker that movie "isn’t a study in character but a view of the world; it’s a masterful setting of mood", praising Deen for doing "terrific job exuding a sense of imperious entitlement" and saying that Lohan's "performance itself is electrifyingly alive". Jason Shawhan's
Nashville Scene review claimed "Lohan tears into this role with fierce energy, walking the fine line between dominance and desperation."
Kent Jones highly praised the film in
Film Comment as "a visually and tonally precise, acid-etched horror story of souls wandering through a hyper-materialist hell, with a fearless and, I think, stunning performance by Lindsay Lohan at its center. On another level, it’s an inspiration and an example to us all: it’s difficult for me to imagine another filmmaker of Paul Schrader’s stature diving into the world of crowd-sourced moviemaking, let alone with such fervor, dedication and rigor."
Retrospective In 2022, Aryan Tauqeer Khawaja reassessed
The Canyons in
Little White Lies, stating that the "much-derided" project is "a sharper take on performance than it first appears", concluding that the film "asserts there's always someone else pulling the strings, making it impossible to extricate oneself from the erosion of self enabled by late capitalism." In an essay for
Mubi, Greg Cwik opined that the film "presents an unprecedented and unmitigated perspective on Hollywood's toxic affluence, as judgmental as it is enamored of the iniquitous lives it depicts. It is a mess, certainly, but a fascinating, sometimes brilliant one, and necessary—a bizarre coalescence of influences and talents representative of and germane to the obsessions of its progenitors." In the years following its release,
The Canyons received screenings suggestive of a "
midnight movie" following, a classification disputed by
The Big Ships's Fred Barrett, who observed the film "isn't so-bad-it's-good, it isn't even bad. It's a strange, austere study of
postmodernity [...] It's a film that's easy to misunderstand and even easier to dislike but, then again, so much interesting and worthwhile art is." In November 2022, Schrader wrote: "I have an enduring fondness for this film which got caught in the cultural meatgrinder ten years back," claiming that contemporary film critics had "reviewed the phenomenon and not the film." A couple of years prior,
Metrograph hosted a screening of the movie followed by a Q&A session with Schrader and
Alex Ross Perry, who had previously described
The Canyons as "
anthropologically fascinating and comprehensive in showing me this ugly side of a horrible culture that I secretly enjoy driving past and looking at."
Vulture's Roxana Hadadi reexamined the movie and called Lohan's performance "the best part" of it and a "persuasive comeback attempt all its own" in retrospect, with "her aura of lived-in disappointment" giving
The Canyons "an advantageous cynicism about Hollywood and who survives there." In 2022,
Interview Magazine listed it as one of their favorite films inspired by "the Hollywood old and new: fame, excess, nihilism, and, of course fashion." In 2023, ''
Men's Health named the film as one of the 35 greatest erotic thrillers of all time, noting that "while the film is flawed, Lohan is its light [and] delivers one of her career-best performances, indicating that the genre suits her smokey voice and allure." Jim Hemphill also wrote a critical reassessment of the movie for IndieWire, acknowledging its qualities as "an anthropological study and poison pen letter to Hollywood" and stated it "gave Schrader new life as a filmmaker." After being selected for inclusion on the Criterion Channel in June 2024, The Guardian compared The Canyons'' to Schrader's
Hardcore stating the films "deliver dueling eulogies for
Tinseltown, portrayed first as a seamy underbelly in 1979 and then as a long-in-decline ghost town by 2013." In December 2025, Brianna Zigler wrote in
Us Weekly that the film "has gained a small but steadfast following of fans who consider it to be a misunderstood film," calling it a "difficult but fascinating watch and a sharper commentary on Hollywood, performance and capitalism than it's given credit for."
Accolades The Canyons was screened as a part of the 14th
Melbourne Underground Film Festival and won four awards: • Best Female Actor for Lindsay Lohan • Best Screenplay for Bret Easton Ellis • Best Foreign Director for Paul Schrader • Best Foreign Film
Home media The Canyons made its DVD and Blu-ray debut on November 26, 2013, courtesy of
MPI Media Group. The release included a 100-minute 'Unrated Director's Cut' of the film. The new cut of the film only runs about a minute longer than the version that was in theaters and video on demand. During a "live tweet" session of the film on Twitter, where Bret Easton Ellis via his own Twitter account and Paul Schrader using
The Canyons' account, discussed their feelings on and experiences with making the film- while viewers watched from home. Here they confessed that a sex scene had to be edited down for the final cut. A sex scene at the beginning of the film, which featured the characters of Tara, Christian and Reid (Danny Wylde), had to have cuts made to meet the content standards of
iTunes. Thus the shots of Reid indulging in masturbation had to go, since they were unsimulated, unlike the other sexual content shown in the film. These shots were included in the version of the film shown at the Film Society of Lincoln Center screening but did not appear in the theatrical or video on demand edit. These shots are restored in the 'Unrated Director's Cut' available on Blu-ray and DVD. A DVD has also been made available featuring the edited version, which the
MPAA gave an R Rating in the United States. In January 2025,
Vinegar Syndrome released a limited edition Blu-ray of
The Canyons with new artwork and bonus features, including audio commentary by film historian
Adrian Martin and a video interview with Schrader.
Box office Debuting only at the IFC Center in the U.S., the film earned $13,351 by the end of its opening weekend. On video on demand and iTunes, the film was said to do "extremely well". The film has grossed a total of $56,825 in United States and $265,670 all around the world. IFC Films has not released the Video on Demand profits of the film, but Bret Easton Ellis, on his Podcast, claimed "
The Canyons was, something like, the number one Video on Demand film IFC released last year. The film has made a profit." ==Soundtrack==