Popular reviews

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  Review by Spencer Williams ★★★ 27

  Claire Denis watching Interstellar: hmmm yés bùt whéré is thé cúm!!!!

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★ 25

  Semen-terstellar

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 14

  In many respects, the mesmerizing and elusive “High Life” is a first for writer-director Claire Denis: the first of her films to be shot in English, the first of her films to be set in space, and the first of her films to follow Juliette Binoche inside a metal chamber that’s referred to as “The Fuckbox,” where the world’s finest actress — playing a mad scientist aboard an intergalactic prison ship on a one-way trip to Earth’s nearest black hole — straddles a giant dildo chair and violently masturbates in a scene that’s endowed with the tortured energy of a Cirque du Soleil routine.

  Needless to say, “High Life” isn’t your average science-fiction movie. In fact, Denis rejects the genre…

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  Review by BRÁT ★★★½ 7

  an unholy mixture of both nihilism and optimism that only claire denis could pull off. it's a literal dog-eat-dog world out there, and the awful events happening in this film (systemic abuse of prisoners, rape, negative health effects from radiation, deadly experimentation) are happening every day in real life. in one early scene, the ethical implications of sending prisoners on a suicide mission to a black hole are reduced to dispassionate conversations between citizens on Earth, much like our reality. we check the news on twitter/in the paper/wherever and discuss with friends over a cup of coffee, angry but comfortable, while the people the stories are about suffer helplessly.

  to be honest, i felt numb when i walked out of…

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  Review by deah ★★★★★ 2

  rob pattinson baby talk asmr

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  Review by siobhan ★★★★★ 8

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

  nooo robert pattinson don’t fly into a black hole ur so sexy aha

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  Review by kársten ★★★★ 9

  Arriving veery fashionably late to this party BUT. This is way more brilliant than I thought it'd be. According to Denis this is her most heart-warming film and it's apparently, at its core, about love. That changed much of how I looked at this thing. She takes something like love, something that, to me, is codependent with time (for reasons that would require a separate essay) and places this "love" story in a setting like space where one could argue time doesn't exist for our characters. Not to mention our characters are in a position where instead of prioritizing work they prioritize love. Denis blends these ideas and uses them to ask how crucial love is to survival and gives us enough to not really have a clear answer, as we shouldn't. This is probably super obvious but I thought that was sick. It also looked great!

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  Review by Sean Baker 17

  So happy I saw this on the big screen and had the opportunity to do so in Vancouver... at a multiplex. Not exactly the locale I'm used to being in when seeing a Claire Denis film.

  I'm sure this will be one of my faves of the year. I felt as helplessly lost as the characters and that's a good thing. My fave Mia Goth performance so far. And the Yorick Le Saux cinematography is a nice blend of film and digital.

  Arri Alexa (scenes in the spaceship)
  Runcam Scope Camera 35 mm (in the black hole)
  Super 16 mm (scenes on earth)

  The Runcam Scope Camera 35 mm is not 35mm film, it is literally a camera inside a…

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  Review by anthony ★★½ 2

  can't believe they missed the perfect opportunity to use the tagline "in space, no one can hear you cream"

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★ 3

  melancholy with dread filling up every corner, but i can’t say i wasn’t transfixed. and the simple concentrated concept of being lost and horny in space... her MIND

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  Review by KYK ★★★★ 3

  claire denis understands that the most open spaces can make the most oppressive prisons, especially when the autonomy over your body is at stake

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 11

  Been careful to avoid hyperbole during this year's TIFF so I wanted to wait until I'd written about it in more detail to confirm but yeah I think this might be a masterpiece, my full review for The Film Stage:

  While High Life has understandably drawn all kinds of comparisons to the 60s and 70s cerebral sci-fi canon (notably Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey), for both its abstract use of space imagery and its minimalist ship design which more often than not resembles an artificially-lit hospital filled with dated technology, its soul is firmly in the sensibilities of its filmmaker, French master Claire Denis, who mines the genre for a deeply sensorial and moving portrait of the misery and…