Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

2020 Directed by Turner Ross, Bill Ross IV

A portrait of the lives of a disparate group of patrons and employees at an American watering hole today.

98 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by BrandonHabes ★★★★½ 2

On the eve of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a collection of broken barflies and lost pariahs gathered at the Roaring 20s dive (off the Vegas strip) to drown their sorrows in smoke and drink, saying farewell to a place they had come to call their family. The bar is a microcosm of the larger, fractured country raging outside, but for one last night before it shuts down for good, it will represent a mutual space of solidarity, lively dance and drunken wisdom for this pack of skeleton boomers looking for refuge from the storm.
This is a tender, laidback film. A film that I initially thought was a documentary while watching, but during the Q&A learned was actually a…
Review by daniel goldhaber

I fuck good and I do stuff!
Review by Victor Morton ★★★★

BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS (Bill and Turner Ross, USA, 2020, 8)
Forget it, Richard Linklater ... DAZED AND CONFUSED and EVERYBODY WANTS SOME were nice tries and then there was QT last year ... but this is the film that defines “hangout movie.” It literally consists of nothing but a day hanging out at the ultimate hang-out site ... a dive bar called the Roaring 20’s Cocktail Lounge where, as the song goes, everybody knows your name. Or where nobody else wants your ass.
I’m writing this sitting at the bar while it’s daylight outside and a series of 80s hits play on the jukebox. The bartender called me by my name despite the fact I haven’t given her a…
Review by Derek Biddle ★★★★½

An almost too-good-to-be-true film. I’m sure glad I stayed for the Q&A.

Sundance #1
Review by seanwang

Sundance 2020.
A sometimes slow, very boozy, hangout movie about the last days of a dive bar on the outskirts of Las Vegas. As a documentary, it works, capturing the essence of its place and people in all its joy and melancholy. Except then the credits roll, the filmmakers come onstage and answer a few questions, and eventually inform the audience that all of it is a constructed reality and none of it is "real?" *cue audible gasps, jaw drops, and the occasional smug head shake*
It "takes place" in Las Vegas, but the bar isn't real and was constructed and shot in New Orleans. All the "non-actors" were cast and given prompts to act out.
It's a good movie,…
Review by Ethan Warren ★★★★

It took perhaps fifteen seconds for Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets to enchant me. I’ll admit to being a sucker for a vintage-style opening title sequence, and when this new film from Bill and Turner Ross, presented in the U.S. Documentary Competition (words I’m choosing carefully), kicked off with a credit design suggesting some long-lost late-’70s masterpiece underscored by the triumphantly melancholic strains of Buck Owens’ “Big in Vegas,” I knew I had stumbled onto something special. It just wasn’t until several hours later—to both my delight and regret—that I would discover just how special.
Full review available as part of my 2020 Sundance coverage for Bright Wall/Dark Room.

Recent reviews

Review by bave 🎃

who do I gotta call to get a beer around here
Review by Rae ★★★½

Interesting combination of documentary and narrative film. Amazing performances portray the bittersweet closing of this beloved bar.
Review by Doug J. ★★★★

Entertaining and involving film about the last day of business for a dive bar in Vegas and the reactions of the regulars who realize they’re about to lose their only family, and sometimes home, once the doors close.
I really loved this film while watching it. But my reaction was based largely on the belief that it was a documentary. In the Q&A afterwards, the filmmakers revealed that it’s more like a Mike Leigh film with non-actors playing characters based on themselves. As more info has come out, I found out that most of it wasn’t even shot in Vegas.
I’ll let my initial rating stand for now, but I need to re-watch in this new light and see if I feel the same way about it.
Review by Kai Cintorino

Sundance #9
...a documentary ethics nightmare. I feel betrayed. I tend to be very pro “art is a lie that tells the truth” and blurring of lines in doc, but this was just too far... in a way only white men would/could do? They truly believe that by spending extensive time in dive bars in the outskirts of Vegas they are experts on that world and can build characters and a bar that are more true to that location than the reality. Pretty uncool that the bar wasn’t in Vegas, and that the actors weren’t from there. I only spent a month in Vegas, but I guess I feel a little defensive of the place, so I can’t even imagine…
Review by Sean P. Means ★★★

Blurring a line that its subjects are too drunk to walk, Bill and Turner Ross’ “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” looks at a group of barflies in a Las Vegas watering hole that is fascinating to watch — especially if you don’t think about how much of it is fictional.
The festival’s film guide doesn’t reveal much about the movie, other than to say “it’s last call for a beloved dive bar known as the Roaring 20s,” and that it chronicles “real people in an unreal situation facing an uncertain future: America at the end of 2016.” And if moviegoers hadn’t read the Los Angeles Times article about the movie earlier this week, that’s all they might have known.
Read the full review at The Movie Cricket: moviecricket.net/sundance-2020/2020/1/31/sundance-review-bloody-nose-empty-pockets-puts-real-people-in-an-unreal-bar
Review by Marshall Granger ★★★★½

The Ross brothers harmonizing with the Safdie brothers in a wild fuck you to the line between "documentaries" and "movies".
Review by Orli Spierer ★★★★

Sundance Film #12:
Sitting at a Dive Bar, People Watching: The Movie
(That's a compliment. The Ross Brothers' dive bar-doc experiment definitely works.)
Review by keyva ★★★★

the spiritual brother of the Smokers Allowed episode of Nathan for You
Review by Zac 🎬🎤🏙 ★★★½

It takes a minute to get there, but these Vegas alcoholics have some genuine wisdom to impart (also not a documentary, but I’m ok with the faulty categorizing)