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,…

9/10

"Do you like Alain Delon?

"Oh yes, he's very handsome!"

Assayas knows what he's talkin' about, man! Irma Vep is now probably my favorite film about filmmaking. Assayas delivers a film that's more about the fantasy of film making. It's about how we like to embody everything in these people. We want to be in their skin as we make the film and Assayas delivers that wonderfully with Irma Vep. 

This is my introduction to Maggie Cheung and hot damn can she act. Her performance was pretty great and interesting since she's playing herself. Assayas directs her in some wonderful scenes, especially with how she interacts with the rest of the crew. I liked how Assayas had his actors…

I'm not a fan of Olivier Assayas, and every reason I have for not liking his works are strongly present in Irma Vep.
Maybe even most explicitly in Irma Vep, the title itself an anagram for the word vampire, but why is not exactly made clear, nor does it seem to have any true meaning except to deconstruct a much older film.

I would've passed this movie, wasn't it for the fact that I didn't check the director and was already halfway in when I found out.
This early work is another piece that feels overly long and over ambiguous in the typical Essayas fashion, yet too simplistic and confusing to really dig further where there is nothing to find.…

Many former critics at influential French journal Cahiers du Cinéma have gone on to become celebrated filmmakers in their own right. But whereas the magazine’s original contributors went on to become the most prominent French filmmakers of their generation, establishing the French New Wave in the process, directors who got their big break via the magazine much later on tended to have a hard time being recognised outside of the influence of their critical predecessors. In the strange case of director Olivier Assayas, there was a different problem altogether - his narrative features were largely examinations of the areas of film he was interested in at any given moment, acting as feature length extensions of his cultural criticism.

In his…