Popular reviews

• 

  Review by iana ★★★½ 3

  god is real and her name is maggie cheung

• 

  Review by karsten ★★★★

  that ending was one of the coolest things i’ve seen in a movie. filmmaking seems fun!

• 

  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★★ 6

  92/100

  Celebrating 20 years of being powerless to articulate my intense love for this glorious whatsit. As I wrote back in '97, it "seems in some bizarre way to entirely transcend logic and reason, so that whatever limited critical faculties I possess are completely disengaged, and I'm reduced to pointing at the screen with a wild-eyed, gleeful expression." What I'm mostly responding to, I think, is Assayas' passion both for Cheung and for cinema itself—more specifically, to the way that those two passions intersect and collide. He's made a movie that's fundamentally an open letter to himself asking why he feels driven to make this movie, and he never does come up with a coherent answer. In less assured hands,…

• 

  Review by jackflowers 6

  "I'd rather have people feel a film before understanding it."
  -Robert Bresson

• 

  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★★ 10

  When the news broke that Olivier Assayas was collaborating with A24 on a TV version of “Irma Vep,” the only truly surprising thing about it was that the project had been conceived before the pandemic. Like Zoom orgies, government-sanctioned bleach injections, and the popular wisdom that Andrew Cuomo is somehow good at his job, the prospect of Assayas remaking his 1996 masterpiece is one of those things that would have seemed unfathomable just a few short months ago. Even for a restlessly inventive filmmaker whose previous foray into television produced the most exciting crime epic of the last 10 years, the pitch reeked of desperation, a fetishistic desire for “normalcy,” and the need to keep working at any cost.

  Until…

• 

  Review by #1 gizmo fan ★★★★ 8

  olivier assayas sure does love his lesbians.. and not making sense...

• 

  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  I get why so many people are obsessed with Maggie Cheung now.

  This is a dream-like film wherein Cheung plays herself in a collapsing film production, caught as an outsider in a strange, detached world. The film is at once a critique of cinema and filmmaking and a strange sort of fantasy.

• 

  Review by I. Simon ★★★★½ 1

  A satire on the filmmaking process and how misguided the film industry is, touching upon tentpole films and pointless remakes, female sexualization/male gaze, and the idea that many filmmakers make films out of their own selfish desires instead of making them for people to enjoy or to be challenged.

  That said, it never once feels condescending and instead comes purely from a place of love and passion for cinema, and it’s all further elevated by wonderful work from Maggie Cheung (playing herself) and Olivier Assayas’s direction.

  A must see for any film lover.

• 

  Review by nickusen

  I am looking at Maggie Cheung respectfully 😳

• 

  Review by Alex Kittle ★★★½ 4

  omg I never realized that "IRMA VEP" was an anagram for "VAMPIRE" ??????? HOW do I have a master's degree!??!?!?!

• 

  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 1

  One of the best endings in cinematic history. Would go in depth but my mind is fucking fried

• 

  Review by Janica ★★★★★

  Easily one of my favourites and greatest films of the 1990s. A film about filmmaking with none of the grandiose hubris and introversion of most entries in that genre. Insights come not from the set but the interrelations between people. Spectacle is not in filming or in egos, but in the flux and length of a late night dinner party with one of the greatest music cues in cinema suddenly revealing a hidden choreography to the dance of people and talk, or likewise in the brutal flurry of a post-screening exodus, cast and crew fleeing the scene in a mad oscillation of cars and headlights bending in short parabolas towards the long lens of Assayas’ camera. Oh: and one of the greatest, most profound endings in all of cinema as well.