The Don Juan of the modern age is a “checker” – wearing a muscle shirt and sporting an undercut. My pad, my car, my muscles, my church, my boys, my girls – Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), ‘ennobled’ by his friends with the telling nickname “Don,” actually has everything that many of his peers might dream of. And too much of some things: too much gel in his hair, too many misogynistic remarks on his lips – and too much porn in his head. At least Jon prefers watching pornographic films, which are completely tailored to his chauvinistic ideas of masculinity, to real sex with women. The latter is no problem for the energetic bartender with well-defined muscles, especially since every night at the club ends in a one-night stand with the most beautiful woman there. Until one night Barbara (Scarlett Johansson) stands at the bar – the most beautiful of them all, a “perfect 10” according to the women rating system of his group of friends. From then on, “dream woman” Barbara determines Jon's thoughts and aspirations, both sexually and emotionally – probably also because she doesn't let herself be picked up so easily. The downside: Barbara tolerates porn just as little as Jon's bartending career, or the fact that he likes to wield a broom himself. Barbara begins to mold Jon to fit the image of the romantic movies she adores. In short, Jon and Barbara, with their media-driven ideas of masculinity and femininity, are a perfect match... until Jon gets to know his attractive, worldly fellow student Esther (Julianne Moore) better – and Barbara discovers the browsing history on Jon's laptop. "Gordon-Levitt's debut wallows in clichés and montages of the same old pickup tricks involving booty dancing, smooching, fast food sex, and the porn images in Jon's head that he would so much like to get out of his head. Even the exaggeration of willing women and perpetually horny men follows the principle of porn. But what Don Jon draws from this is so refreshing that it can be described as a light-hearted comedic counterweight to Steve McQueen's heavy sex addiction drama Shame, before it changes tone at the end: With a clever line from Jon's sister, who is supposedly absorbed in her cell phone, and the intelligent approach of an older woman (Moore), who makes a “rite of passage” of a healing kind possible. Given the previous tone, this somewhat saccharine ending could be described as as contrived as a marriage at the end of a porn film, were it not for the fact that the preceding struggle between excess and abstinence is so captivatingly told. In Jon's weekly confession in church, delivered with delicious conscientiousness, a life with porn is punished with the same number of Hail Marys as a life without." (Kathrin Häger, on: filmdienst.de)