Popular reviews

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  Review by reibureibu 12

  Ever thought about how unsettling it would be to be lost out at sea in the middle of the night? The dark waves churning and slopping against your head as you try to keep afloat, the water rushing into your ears, your nostrils, your mouth.

  Between the sloshing noises you may hear squawking somewhere. Is it overhead, or far away? North, west, east, south? We've lost all sense of direction by now. And like a passing helicopter that can't land to pick you up, the flocks of gulls merely carry forward, ignoring your plight as they have the freedom of flight.

  Under your feet you sense the endless depths below, a world imbued in darkness where all manner of things…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★

  73/100

  Not as brilliantly composed as the first half of Sweetgrass, but it doesn't much matter—the images picked up on the fly are among the most astonishing ever captured. Still, I do think claims have been a bit overstated, in that this is really just a much artier (which is to say, more abstract) version of unmediated nature docs like Microcosmos and Winged Migration, with some human labor thrown in to excite the left. Personally, I find that allowing people beyond the periphery of the frame—I'm okay with the bravura opening sequence and its briefly glimpsed arms and shoulders—breaks the spell, if only because we're so hard-wired to study the faces of our own species in search of behavioral clues;…

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  Review by sarah squirm ★★★½

  wish i was curating the trippy visuals for the Electric Daisy Carnival so i could play this on loop on an enormous LED screen behind Tiesto while he DJs for 50,000 teenagers tripping on molly

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  Review by DirkH ★★★★★ 5

  Whenever you call any work of art unique, time is bound to catch up on you and make you take back your words. But I'm going to go ahead and call Leviathan unique anyway.

  Documentary makers Castaign and Paravel create a haunting and estranging vision of the harsh life on board a fishing vessel. In dark and grim colours they paint pictures so alien and bizarre that they come across more as surreal than grim reality. With muffled and muted sounds from the real world trying to break through in the background the pictures we are shown bob and weave from abstract surrealism to tangible realism, creating something akin to a fisherman's waking dream.

  There is method in this madness…

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  Review by David Sims ★★★★ 3

  Is it weird that I got super horny while watching this?

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  Review by LinusMxx

  Film Genre Challenge for January: Documentary #8

  • If you really want to know what it must feels like to be working as a fisherman on a boat or even a fish (yes, a fish) in the middle of a deep, angry, cold, and gloomy ocean for an hour and a half, then look no further. A documentary film mostly shot in GoPro cameras, Leviathan, a harrowing take on the commercial fishing industry, has the power to immerse you in the lives of those in the boat by having these cameras strapped onto the fishermen and yes, even the fish themselves. What a hauntingly beautiful and intensely overwhelming sensory experience.

  • No dialogue, no musical score, no storyline, no commentary,…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★ 8

  “If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer not to have gotten cut in half.“

  Dead before you die.

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  Review by Warp ★★★½ 5

  Succesfull and unique documentary about commercial fishing that miraculously results in an almost experimental horrorfilm. Although it’s not really informative, with no interviews or voice-overs, it’s (luckily) mostly focused on being an audiovisual experience, filled with dark, dynamic shots, haunting night scenes and lots of blood. Definitely not for everyone, it’s mostly cinema that grabs you by the throat, or doesn’t, but for me it was a great hypnotic journey. There seems to be a six hour version of this, but that seems like too much, after 80 minutes or so, I felt like I had experienced enough. This kind of abstract documentaries are always a pleasure to discover.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

  O, I earned my keep and I paid me way,
  And I earned the gear that I was wearing;
  Sailed a million miles, caught ten million fishes,
  We were dreaming of the shoals of herring.

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  Review by nictate ★★★½ 1

  An aquatic Eraserhead. Watching it gave me the sensation of being an internal organ. Maybe a spleen. Insistent, exhausting, alive.

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  Review by Blake Williams ★★★★

  For all the talk about consciousness, environment, and labour that is getting tossed around with this one – all of which, don’t get me wrong, are among the major themes here – the project seems to be first and foremost an attempt at recalibrating viewers’ sense of gravity. Functioning as a quasi-sequel to Michael Snow’s landmark (pun kind of intended) La région centrale, Leviathan thrashes the camera erratically in any and every which direction; space is spun, flipped, and exploded to often vertiginous effect, to the point where I felt like I was going to fall out of my seat on a few occasions (oh how I would kill for an IMAX screening). One could even say that Castaing-Taylor and…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 6

  Directed by a duo from Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), "an experimental laboratory that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography ... [using] analog and digital media, ... to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world," it's no surprise that Leviathan is a visceral experience first, second, and third.

  Starting with just audio as our guide to indistinguishable actions being carried out in nearly complete darkness, the film gradually adds more visuals to the mixed, but they're almost always experiential rather than contextual, or logical. And so the thrum of engines is joined by the butchering of fish, seen through a camera sloshing in a bin alongside their bulging eyes and protruding tongues; rhythmic sounds of…