Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  The hotel seems to pulsate arrhythmically, walls flexing, elevators moving sporadically, lights flickering, people coming and going. It's dingy and ugly, but the camera finds angles from which it is symmetrical or striking, close up where the details blur or from a distant where the details blend with bad paint and paneling. Small movements and alterations indicate life, indicate energy, indicate action, but the sense of decay remains, the stillness is never wholly thwarted.

  52 project: 47/52

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 19

  There's something terribly intimate about getting to watch filmmakers find themselves in the medium: being there as they discover what moves them; what thrills them; what, for them, feels most urgent. Hotel Monterey is a silent document of Chantal Akerman doing just that: working through her influences — people she'd met and been inspired by during her time in New York* — and figuring out how they connect or don't connect with her personal needs and sensibilities.

  Reportedly shot over the course of fifteen straight hours, with virtually no planning beyond going from the bottom of the hotel to its top, the film is instinct mixed with rigorous discipline. We spend time with three specific individuals, each of whose presence…

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★ 13

  "When you read a text, you're on your own time. That is not the case in film. In fact, in film, you're dominated by my time. But time is different for everyone. Five minutes isn't the same thing for you as it is for me." Though Chantal Akerman said this in 2004, I think it stands as an ideal statement of purpose for her early '70s work. Shot primarily in a single night over the course of fifteen hours, Akerman's Hotel Monterey is a dark, temporal rumination that ushers the viewer "somewhere beyond the merely informative." Much like her first New York film La Chambre, there is no sound or text presented, though in this case the footage has even…

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus: blast injury] ★★★★½ 2

  Chantal Akerman on/off the scene lulling the Hotel Monterey and its myriad inhabitants & visitors into a peaceful trance so that she can peacefully navigate and gaze upon them, casting them in screen tests for a potential movie about themselves playing themselves within the Hotel Monterey playing itself as that potential movie collapses into this movie, Hotel Monterey, a fictional recreation of itself inside of itself pretending that it is 1972 in 1972 seriously far out as a series of nearly still lives cast beatifically accompanied by the most amazingly hideous chocolate/avocado/orange accents pretty much ever, even/especially when they are augmenting/clashing with very pale light blues, greens and creams? beige slab quaalude ring upright left standing unmoored from the stars butter…

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  Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★½

  A home feels eternal. It's that one place you run to for safety, warmth and solace in the wake of everything else that is wrong with the world. You can always count on a home to be there for you. It exists in a place separate and unique and it is yours. They are also fragile and with time can evolve into hotels. When your home becomes a temporary residence it feels like you've lost a loved one. That safety and place just for you is gone and it isn't easy to find a new one. Losing your home is a kind of death, and hotels have always felt like graveyards. The residents shuffle about only temporarily like wayward ghosts…

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  Review by cuckoochanel ★★★½ 2

  It seems we humans, when faced with the abstract, tend to go into an involuntary, frenzied mental rolodex search to ascribe some sort of meaning to the nonsensical, to find kinship with the foreign, structure in the elusive. As Chantal Akerman’s grainy celluloid rolled on a now-unrecognizable Hotel Monterey, in an equally altered 1972 New York City, I was plunged into the icy unknown of ambiguity, and as a survival instinct began labeling each oblique scene as they correlated to my own unremarkable experiences; some from life, some literary, others more cinematic.  

  The lobby transported me to the residential Hotel Gloriana in Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day. Chantal in her robin-egg blue boudoir mentally conjured its sister chamber, a…

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  Review by 🎃Jerry McGlothlin🎃 ★★★½ 9

  Around the 10 minute mark of Hotel Monterey, it occurred to me that I was not going to be able to watch this in silence as intended, due to my house being filled with voices, the distant echo of televisions and just general noisiness. Rather than be incessantly pestered by these aural distractions, I hastily decided to queue up something I thought would accompany the film well: Eno’s seminal classic “Ambient 1/Music for Airports”.

  Thankfully, this leap of faith turned out to be a marvelous choice; the album meshed perfectly with Akerman’s work. Spacial austerity through the stases of her composed images. Carefully structured, meticulously and delicately crafted impressions of a gloomy hotel in New York City. There are moments…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 1

  I do wonder if Stanley Kubrick and/or the Coens watched this before making their own hotel-set horrors.The simple act of documentation hasn't creeped me out so much since I watched Brakhage's THE ACT OF SEEING WITH ONE'S OWN EYES. Every cut its own little jolt. (I did like the occasional moment of hotel guests moving to get on an elevator and freezing when they see Akerman's camera in it, unsure of what to do. The film documents the inhuman natural state of a building built for human transience, and as unsettling as it is shooting empty corridors at perfectly chosen angles, it's never more awkward and uncomfortable than when people are actually present.

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★

  It's a trashy place, a worn-down, down-trodden, disheveled dump of a place. When's the last time the windows have been washed, the carpet cleaned or anything dusted? There's cracks in the walls and water damage in the ceiling, but that's perhaps beyond what can be done for now. It's such a lonely place, an empty place, when it should be warm and pleasant and comfortable.

  But somehow it's still comfort-ing, a reminder of before and always a part of your past, a place you used to call 'home' and still could call 'home' and maybe someday you'll buy it and renovate it and fix it all up and then call it 'home'. But even if you didn't it still holds…

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★

  You've traveled through time, back to early-70s New York. Due to some malfunction of your equipment, you can't hear anything, and you're restricted to a shabby residential hotel, the residents of which seem only vaguely aware of you. It's hard for you to move and time seems to jump ahead or stand still in jagged, arbitrary spurts. You want to ask people questions but you can't, hear what they're saying to each other but you can't, walk around the hotel freely but you can't. All you can do is watch.

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  Review by Auteur ★★★★½ 1

  Hôtel Monterey is a sixty minute silent documentary comprised of shots inside a hotel in New York, that progress from the ground floor in the beginning, to the roof at the end, and with it Ackerman manages to successfully engage both my love of hotels and my fear of old photographs, a tricky prospect indeed.

  First, the hotels. More often than not they have been my favorite parts of vacations I have taken. The sense of anonymity, of potential rebirth, and the lack of a need for responsibility has always afforded me much greater comfort than the quality of the night's sleep, even though getting lost in a King-sized bed full of what seems like a thousand pillows brushing up…

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  Review by Brian Formo

  On the plane home from the post-Xmas/New Year’s “dead week”, the people next to me must’ve thought I was insane for watching elevator doors open and close, lights turn off and on, still photographs set for multiple seconds at a time, and hallway pushins with no one there. But I judged them too cuz they were watching a Ben Falcone joint. Anyway, we all fell asleep but only I felt “super intelligent.”