Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★★ 12

  It can be hard to avoid talking about Adam Curtis's films without sounding like one of Adam Curtis's voiceovers, so I'm not going to try and resist.

  This is a review about what happened when a film-maker for the BBC was handed a box. Inside the box was eighteen terabytes of footage - the sum total of all the BBC's news footage from Afghanistan. This man was Adam Curtis. Curtis was driven by a belief that the existing news media had failed. Fearful of backlash and being seen as biased, it had ran away from its duty to tell us stories that explained the world, and ended up in a morass of what he termed "Oh Dearism".

  But Curtis was…

• 

  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½ 1

  Some 60-or-so years after FDR offered up private contractors to build dams in Afghanistan, to literally control the intrinsic power of this place, there's a riot in Kabul after the American military bombs an Afghan village. The riot is captured by a camera with a dead pixel right in the middle of the frame, taunting you with the sliver of information it withholds, like if only it were filled in you could solve everything.

• 

  Review by Daisoujou ★★★★½ 15

  Fair warning, I'm gonna dump out all my angsts and doom in here. Don't read this if you're not in the right mindstate.

  ---

  We're living through terrible times. In various ways, especially looking globally, things have always been terrible, but it feels especially dire this year. I was fairly young, but I remember 9/11. It dominated national attention for months. I can see the ways that this single event has had consequences, shifting our way of life ever since. There was an intense rise in patriotism, which has steadily been dying down in recent times. It became a cover to ramp up surveillance and security theater in the country. But maybe the most striking thing is what a tragedy…

• 

  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  Somewhat of a recapitulation of THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES, juxtaposing twinned, equally narcissistic and corrupt ideologies. But now both of them are hopelessly intertwined with the self-perpetuation of capital. Deliberately disorganized, given Curtis' repeated point that these cycles only persist directly because of the belief that no narrative can be spun that could make sense of them, that no responsible party could ever be discovered and that no rational response exists. Places its dueling structures, and by extension Afghanistan itself, as sentient things that expose and eventually mutually assimilate each other and everything they touch, including any attempt to control that very power.

• 

  Review by Will Steele ★★★★½

  His style is eclectic, his analysis is holistic, and his needle drops are exquisite: Adam Curtis offers an answer to a bafflingly big question with an accessible narrative which constantly stimulates our video-jaded sensibilities. 

  One power of documentaries is to make us think and feel through sheer reality, and the dizzying collage of history, politics, economics and culture makes for an eye-opening exposé.

• 

  Review by aaronchen 3

  This movie is like my version of Love, Actually. So many stars, bin laden, Saddam, Kanye West, Burial, confused warlord Obama, teaching a war torn country about conceptual art (western saviour complex), tarkovsky, hypernormalisation and lots of dancing.

• 

  Review by Joe ★★★★

  Key shot here is a very brief one of a tank gun being aimed directly at the camera - this is more confrontational than Curtis' other work, telling a long, dense story of a specific country that has ramifications that go well beyond even the expansive text of the film. Also more experimental than his other docs (at least the ones I've seen), with a lot of time given over to extended, narration-free vignettes with no clear illustrative purpose but that speak volumes all the same.

  Has anyone ever made a joke like "Adam Curtis Loves Big 'But's" or am I the first?

• 

  Review by 🐱Andrew Chrzanowski🐱 ★★★★½ 3

  ☆"This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense."☆

  I'm back on the Adam Curtis kick again after taking a brief break, and with two more acclaimed films to go in his challenging filmography, we're up to Bitter Lake tonight. No more series for him, as this singular picture sustains for nearly 140 minutes of dense research and theory.

  This time, the filmmaker brings a story that is a little less enigmatic and experimental than some of his other works -- namely It Felt Like a Kiss -- but headier and clearly orchestrated for an audience that is plugged-in to current events and globalization and its discontents. In other words, as Letterboxd all-star Steven Sheehan said in…

• 

  Review by laird ★★★★ 7

  Adam Curtis views 20th century politics like a Greek tragedy. Power, in seeking to rid itself of some equivalent of an oracle's warning, always ends up causing some unintended, often ironic, catastrophe. Hubris and oversimplification will be power's downfall. History is conscious and will send its ghosts to haunt storytellers who forget to read the prologue. Curtis doesn't deviate too far from his established style, but does allow for some long stretches of observation with little narration or text on-screen (it seemed to me longer than he ever has before, anyway). There also seems to be more unity, more rhyming between the mostly contemporary footage than in previous Curtis films. He favors shots that are imbalanced and in motion seeking…

• 

  Review by Michael Mann Facts ★★★★½

  For a voice sometimes so robotic, I think Curtis understands the emotional, human response to music and the moving image better than most of his narrative contemporaries.

• 

  Review by Mark Cunliffe 🇵🇸 ★★★½ 1

  Another wonderful collage and thought provoking documentary from that great film maker Adam Curtis.

  Fans of his short movies for Charlie Brooker's various series or his previous series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace may find the two hour twenty running time occasionally a little ponderous and possibly even over ambitious but the troubled history of Afhganistan and the ripples it sends out across the world to this day is a big subject that deserves a somewhat epic examination.

  Seasoned Afghan reporter Emma Graham-Harrison has written in The Guardian about the occasional over simplification of such a complex story and whilst I am no expert at all I am inclined to agree that some conclusions Curtis draws do…

• 

  Review by Sean Gilman ★★★★

  Nothing really new for Curtis's message: the stories we tell ourselves to explain the world bear little relation to reality and tend to compound the problems they purport to explain, making them much, much worse. What is new is the focus on one single country, Afghanistan, and the inclusion of a ton of fascinating first-person footage of the last decade of war, beautiful at times, but mostly horrifying. It's a sobering companion to The Power of Nightmares, Curtis's story of the parallel rise of islamic fundamentalism and neo-conservatisim, a visceral tragedy balancing that film's flippantly comic absurdity. It's probably the best film ever about this war.