Popular reviews

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  Review by russman ★★★★ 2

  I wouldn't want George Costanza as my lawyer

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  Review by 🖤 ★★★★ 6

  walking into this I did NOT expect

  
  - learning tim robbins is 6’5”
  - potential origin of the mr postman vine
  - Macaulay Culkin
  - SILENT HILL INSPIRATION
  - twin peaks esque score
  - and George from Seinfeld

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  Review by DirkH ★★★★½ 21

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

  This is a horror film that manages to grab you both by its mysteriously creepy content and its harrowing visuals.

  In essence this film is, to me at least, an oppressive and bleak depiction of purgatory. Through a perfectly paced script, we are slowly drawn into Jacob's increasingly weird world, riddled with disturbing hallucinations and paranoia. We are never told explicitly why the things that happen, happen and I love it all the more for it. Up until the very end that is, where we are handed a possibility, one I interpret to be a religious one. Because we see Jacob dying, everything that we have been shown thus far is thrown into a completely different light.

  In the bible…

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  Review by COBRARocky ★★★★ 1

  Is it a war movie? A psychological horror? A religious horror story? A drama about PTSD? A legal drama? A conspiracy thriller? What the hell is going on? Is that a demon penis?

  It’s like the movie is a fever dream that you’re having, and it manages to operate brilliantly on that sickly dream logic yet it still makes perfect sense when you think about it later.

  It's also a masterpiece of restraint when it comes to its scares. The most effectively terrifying moment in the movie is a scene where Jacob hears a voice at his bedside, turns to see the source, and bursts into tears. We never see what it was that spoke to him, and while we…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 1

  Jacob’s Ladder creeped me WAYYYY THE F OUT when I was a kid. I had recurring nightmares about this film and some of its imagery throughout the 90’s and I’d wake up screaming in a sweat drenched terror, yet I could never turn it off when I’d come across it on cable. 

  I love 90’s psychological thrillers that veer into horror territory, and I’m so glad this has remained a cult classic over the years with a growing fan base and rather impressive influence on numerous films, television shows, video games, and music.
  Hopefully my suppressed nightmare stays that way.

  Cool beans, yo.

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  Review by JBird ★★★★ 2

  Jacob is stuck on the Ladder,
  In a role that keeps getting sadder.
  So he'll keep sulkin',
  Over kid Culkin,
  Slowly getting madder and madder.

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★★ 4

  I love when a filmmaker leverages the clout and budget afforded in the aftermath of a surprise Oscar nomination. After Fatal Attraction,  Adrian Lyne cashed out his golden ticket to make a phantasmagoric conspiracy thriller about a Vietnam veteran mailman with PTSD and maybe something worse. Profoundly dark, especially by late ‘80s standards. This is a source code for Se7en and The Devil’s Advocate and a lot of other Hollywood dalliances with Judeo-Christian concepts of demonic evil, with screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin’s overt references to Dante’s Inferno and a taste for an unsarcastic Cronenbergian body horror. War Is Hell, etc. 

  Rubin’s script was allegedly one of Hollywood’s most admired and unproduceable of its era, and it shows. This is willfully uncommercial,…

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  Review by 🎥 Kemper ★★★★ 2

  I think I’m gonna need a little while to process this film as a whole, one things for certain though, Tim Robbins performance was phenomenal. This is one of the greatest psychological horror films I’ve ever seen, the ending and entire meaning of the movie hit me so hard with that ending shot, the imagery in this movie is absolutely terrifying and haunting, the film keeps you guessing all throughout what’s reality and what’s not, of course in the end it’s all explained but even then you can’t tell for sure. I went into the film with almost no idea what it was about, I knew it was about a man named Jacob who was a Vietnam vet and is…

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  Review by [callum.s] ★★★★ 2

  where the fuck was the ladder

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  Review by Chris Gilman ★★½ 1

  The scene where Tim Robbins suddenly holds up a polaroid photo of Macaulay Culkin, who was not in the movie at all prior to that point, and begins hysterically weeping, was my favorite part, out of context.

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  Review by Sethsreviews ★★★★ 3

  A traumatising fever dream that never lets up. This was really good, but completely draining. If not for the lack of coherence and overuse of unnecessary exposition at points, I would've loved this. However, even through its negatives, it manages to assert itself as a commanding commentary on PTSD and personal tragedy.

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  Review by Symon ★★★★ 1

  I’ve never met a chiropractor who didn’t LOVE this movie..... just saying.