Gosh, where do I begin.... Cosmopolis is a mess. A big, beautiful and very intelligent mess. It is a very difficult film to come to terms with, especially because Cronenberg seems intent on the viewer not liking it at all. He keeps you at a distance and gives you a cold and analytical commentary on the state of the world as we know it. And it works. Well, sort of.

Let's start with the obvious. Pattinson is fine. He has talent and proves himself to be a very capable actor. The character he plays is the owner of a big company that deals with the world of finance. What they do exactly is never clear, but they are definitely big…

I had high hopes for Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis yet I left disappointed ... I think. I’m unsure of my opinion because it is an enigmatic film - it is dense, different and very difficult. Having never read Don DeLillo’s novel I was unsure quite what to expect but I still wasn’t quite expecting this. It is a postmodern Odyssey and a story for and about our times filtered through the eyes of a blank and privileged dick. Despite being confined to a limo that always slowly crawls forward it is a story that is static to the point of being inert. It is an episodic series of verbose conversations that are flatly expressed and stretched out to a near maddening degree.…

One of the only truly discomforting films I've ever seen, Cosmopolis forces itself upon you in such a way as to assert not only narrative but experiential dominance: this film is terrifying because it drops us into a world which is complete, sane, a world in which everything makes sense - but only because things are meaningless.

The inference of many that not only is Cosmopolis one of Cronenberg's weakest but also one of the weakest films ever made is absurd to me because every individual 'offputting' facet of the film (the unsubtle greenscreen, Pattinson's bizarre anti-realist performance) so clearly and directly contributes to the overall vision of the piece that there is no doubting the films' manifesto (for lack…

Cosmopolis is a slow-burn existential thriller like no other. Robert Pattinson stars as Eric Packer, a twenty-something dot-com billionaire who has spent every moment of his life molding himself into an ice-hearted reptilian scumbag. He treats unfeeling dispassion as the ultimate power move, and it's worked. But beneath the surface, he's preoccupied with feeling, experiencing, devouring, and living. Instead of attending to these base needs he has channeled his urges for destruction and consumption into becoming stupidly wealthy.

Eric buys and sells assets at such a rate that dollar values cease to have meaning. As he looks at the video screens decorating his technological wet dream of a limousine, all of this transfer of wealth, items and people passes by…

I'm not totally sure why but I really enjoyed this- considerably more than I expected to. I think it's a combination of the dedication to a very strange style and the satisfying character study of Pattinson's lead. I was just engaged throughout and by the time the final scene rolled around it seemed so peculiar but also thrilling and unlike much else I have watched in a while.

I could imagine people being at odds with the style though, which is made up of strangely stilted and cold dialogue, often pseudo-philosophical or packed with economics jargon. And as the film is essentially a series of protracted conversations between multimillionaire wunderkind Eric Packer (Pattinson) and various others, mostly in his car.…