to make final tweaks to the film. That year, Courteney Cox became pregnant with her first child, and producers realised she would be unavailable to promote the film until after she gave birth. After some deliberation, it was decided that the film would not be released to theaters until the following summer. However, it was screened outside the United States at the Oslo International Film Festival on November 20, 2004. Danielle Renfrew was nominated for the Producers Award at the 2005 Independent Spirit Awards—the ceremony for which was held in February 2005—in part for her work on November. On April 26, 2005, the film was screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, whose organisers described it as a "homage to the mindbending thrillers of David Lynch ... Inspired by the perception-versus-reality mindgames of Mulholland Drive and the eerie psychological aesthetic of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now". Audience response at its screening at the festival was generally positive, but critic Brandon Judell dismissed the film as "highly irritating and nonsensical," while Joanne Beally said it was "a Mulholland Drive / David Lynch copycat ... even at 88 minutes, it was too long for me." The film made subsequent appearances at the Seattle International Film Festival (on May 31, 2005) and the Los Angeles Film Festival (on June 22, 2005). Reception Critical reviews of November upon its eventual United States release were lukewarm. Greg Bellavia of Film Threat described the film as "Run Lola Run meets Pi with a splash of Seven ... As a thriller it seems awfully familiar and has trouble establishing a voice all its own", but added "Harrison and company manage to create one of the strangest romantic films out there and for their attempt at the offbeat deserve to be recognized." The New York Daily News was more negative in its summary of the film, labelling it a "convoluted and unsatisfying psychological drama." Mark Holcomb, reviewing for The Village Voice, said the film was "less compelling the more apparent its solution becomes. But before the foregone conclusion surfaces about halfway through, its disparate, unnerving components are mesmerizing." F. X. Feeney of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "it never becomes a mystery, like, say, Mulholland Drive, or even The Sixth Sense (despite the gimmicky magnitude of its final reveal)", while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it "a low-watt reworking of M. Night Shyamalan and David Lynch." Scott Tobias