According to Ebert:  In 2018 however, Gallo rebuked Ebert's statement, calling it "both far-fetched and an outright lie." He went on to state the final cut was only 8 minutes shorter than the Cannes cut, not 26 as Ebert claimed. According to Gallo "If you didn’t like the unfinished film at Cannes, you didn’t like the finished film, and vice versa," going on to speculate that Ebert wanted to distance himself from "a brutal, dismissive review of a film that other, more serious critics eventually felt differently about." Nevertheless, "The Brown Bunny" still received mixed reviews from other critics and has a rating of 46% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 94 reviews with an average score of 5.17/10. The site's consensus states "More dull than hypnotic, "The Brown Bunny" is a pretentious and self-indulgent bore." Metacritic gives the film a score of 51 out of 100 based on reviews from 30 critics. French cinema magazine "Les Cahiers du Cinéma" voted "The Brown Bunny" one of the ten best films of 2004. The film won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Vienna International Film Festival for its "bold exploration of yearning and grief and for its radical departure from dominant tendencies in current American filmmaking". The film, aside from the feud with Roger Ebert, gained some positive reaction from American critics as well. Neva Chonin of the "San Francisco Chronicle" called it "a somber poem of a film sure to frustrate those who prefer resolution to ambiguity... like an inscrutably bad dream, [it] lingers on". The film was praised by other filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, John Waters, Sean Penn, and Werner Herzog who called it "the best portrayal of the particular loneliness a man feels." "The Daily Telegraph" listed "The Brown Bunny" as one of the 100 "defining" films of the decade, calling it the decade's "most reviled" film, but saying it was "destined to become a future lost classic". In August 2004 upon the film's limited theatrical release in the United States, star Sevigny took to defending the film and its final scene, stating:  Right before the film's Cannes premiere, the William Morris Agency had dropped her as a client. A source there reportedly said, "The scene was one step above pornography, and not a very big one. William Morris now feels that her career is tainted and may never recover, especially after rumors began circulating about the even more graphic outtakes that didn't make it into the actual film."