Popular reviews

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  Review by karsten ★★★½ 8

  i am so confident that tarantino loves this

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★ 1

  🎵 is that all there is, is that all there is?
  if that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
  let's break out the booze and have a ball
  if that's all there is 🎵

  the handheld fuzziness of the images, the bleeding glow of the dive bar lights, the hazy, multi-layered room noise sound design—one of the best stylistic and sonic approximations of bittersweet drunken melancholy i've ever seen. a nation's last collective hangover. "i'll be seein' all you weirdos again."

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

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  Review by Nakul ★★★★

  “It was fun while it lasted."

  Ross brothers' BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS, was totally my kinda movie. An intimate, bittersweet hangout movie focusing on a closing-down Las Vegas watering hole. An empathetic portrait of loneliness and finding a connection & home in a community of lost souls, the documentary blurs the line between reality and fiction.

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  Review by Scott Tobias ★★★★ 1

  Another mesmerizing experiment from the Ross Brothers, this film contrives and evokes like their Tchoupitoulas, setting barflies loose in a made-up Las Vegas bar on its last night. Greetings from the end of the world.

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 1

  “Is John gone?”
  “Everybody’s gone, boo.”

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  Review by Mark Asch ★★★★½

  Derek Jarman’s WILL YOU DANCE WITH ME? for ugly straight people: a behaviorist experiment via a staged fly-on-the-wall documentary, this time about the kind of bar where there are probably literal flies on the wall.

  Jarman’s film, for which he built a gay club in early-80s London, gains unspeakable poignancy in hindsight for the looming AIDS plague; the Ross Bros couldn’t know they were making this on the cusp of another pandemic that would similarly wipe out spaces like the Roaring 20s Cocktail Lounge, but they build in a sense of impending finality anyway—not just the entire Last Call conceit, but even the name of the bar suggests an impending crash, and even if Kenny Rogers hadn’t died between the…

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  Review by John Frankensteiner ★★★★½ 1

  Forever baffled why screenwriters attempt complicated plots when hanging out with some sad people in a bar is all a movie ever needs to be. With the immediate intimacy, the vulnerability, the laughs with a thick haze of melancholy, these are movies that can't help but find moments of truth or reach an emotional epiphany because there is nothing but truth in a room full of people getting liquored up and the end result of that can only ever be a terrifying emotional epiphany. This is what every movie should strive for, something Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets does relentlessly, seemingly with little effort, the ultimate sign of mastery. Throw in that the bar is closing, and all the metaphors one…

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  Review by Josh Larsen ★★★★ 6

  So what do we have here? And does it matter?

  Fiction, I’d argue, best captures the universal, while documentary—like journalism—details the specific. If Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a singular achievement, it’s in the way the movie manages to do a little bit of both.

  www.larsenonfilm.com/bloody-nose-empty-pockets

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★½

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  An interesting experiment with documentary cinema techniques — though by the anticlimactic end it made me wish I was watching an actual documentary about the closure of a real dive bar, rather than a pseudo-fictional version of that scenario.

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  Review by Hutch ★★★★ 2

  This is reality fabricated to brilliant effect. For all appearances it’s a documentary about the last day of operation of an off-strip Las Vegas bar, The Roaring ‘20s, with an affectionate lens cast over its staff and clientele. Except, in reality the bar is not in Vegas and the people are only actors. But the illusion is a material one, and it gets to the spirit of reality through heavy improvisation (and drinking) on everyone’s part. And I loved it. 

  There’s something timeless about bars like this. While on the outside the world hurtles on, on the inside the people are suspended in amber, lost to time, until the day comes when the world circles back and closes in and…

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  Review by 🐱Andrew Chrzanowski🐱 ★★★★½ 17

  ☆"I pride myself on not becoming an alcoholic until after I already became a failure."☆

  A docu-hybrid which has flown a little under the radar, nonetheless Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets landed on Indiewire's list of the best films of 2020. This is the latest feature by the Ross Brothers -- Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross -- that Matt Zoller Seitz called "a classic indie film that will irritate or mystify some viewers while inspiring evangelical fervor in others."

  It's also the drunkest movie of the year.

  Filled with one unforgettable moment after another, and indelible characters you can only find by turning over every leaf and looking under every rock, the Ross Brothers go inside a small bar in…