Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Lucy ★★ 10

  actually i played myself by watching this whole thing

• 

  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½ 1

  Maybe the most elegant, accessible, and exacting piece of film criticism ever.

• 

  Review by Alice Stoehr ★★★★½ 4

  A mammoth essay that moves with wry humor and encyclopedic thoroughness in these widening loops through and around Hollywood's depictions of Los Angeles. It's a cornucopia, pulling clips from hundreds of movies (indie obscurities, trashy erotic thrillers, Chinatown) and organizing them into an overarching narrative. At first, it seems to be mostly about the film industry and Andersen's bitterness toward it; he rails against its continuity errors ("silly geography makes for silly movies"), its popularization of the term "L.A.," and its association of modern architecture with plutocratic villainy. These cranky tirades are enjoyable, sometimes even insightful, but once the film gets to its final chapter ("The City as Character"), a broader design becomes clear. This is worlds beyond a mere…

• 

  Review by Filipe Furtado

  Andersen achievement has less to do with Los Angeles (despite the many insightful things it has to say about it) than the way his film made us fully aware about how movies think, record and express themselves. A true political film because it manages to expose how ideology develops while allowing us to come to our on conclusions about how film form carries it.

• 

  Review by sprizzle ★★★★½ 3

  This film is exhausting...I'll prove it. Complete list of films mentioned in this introspective documentary from Thom Andersen.

  
  The Crimson Kimono (1959)
  Pushover (1954)
  He Walked by Night (1948)
  Nocturne (1946)
  Pushover (1954)
  The Strip (1951)
  Out of Bounds (1986)
  Hickey and Boggs (1972)
  The Glimmer Man (1996)
  They Live (1988)
  Out of Bounds (1986)
  The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
  Blade (1998)
  The New Centurions (1972)
  Brother (2001)
  52 Pick-Up (1986)
  Blade (1998)
  The Million Dollar Hotel (2001)
  Night on Earth (1991)
  Safe (1995)
  The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
  The Glimmer Man (1996)
  Boyz N the Hood (1991)
  The Takeover (1994)
  2001 filming Swordfish
  East of Eden (1955)
  Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
  The Music Box (1932)
  Mr. Blanding Builds His Dreamhouse…

• 

  Review by davidehrlich ★★★½

  the personal too seldom serves the abstract (goes off the rails with the Dragnet stuff in the home stretch before making a great recovery by reverting to issues of class), but still a compulsively watchable cinematic history full of dry wit. at its best when canon conflates canon, the chosen selection of Los Angeles (*not* LA) films taking on new life when they return and overlap, the Angels Flight casually returning from the void in the film's final moments and bringing a tidal wave of history with it.

  and in the spirit of the piece, here's a recycled twitter joke:

  the whole theater gasped at the end of LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF when it was revealed that Los Angeles was *actually* played by Daniel Day-Lewis.

• 

  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 1

  damn my life a movie rn. not over him saying boorman made LA look “bland” in point blank but nonetheless a dizzying and comprehensive piece of passionate film criticism and the real-world history of a city through its own images.

• 

  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½

  I can’t say it better than my friend Rumsey Taylor: “The best movie review you will ever watch.” Yes. I aspire to one day create a work of criticism that contains as much insight, poetry, wit, knowledge, research, and footage of House on Haunted Hill as Los Angeles Plays Itself.

• 

  Review by Will Steele ★★★★★

  Sure, I am prone to hyperbole, but this must be the best documentary I have ever seen.

  Here’s why...

  Odds are that you are like me and love the movies. We’re obsessed with the mess that is Hollywood. It‘s glamour. It’s sinister artificiality. It’s self-obsession and self-destruction. So as subject and object, Los Angeles is home to a bounty of intrigue for us all. 

  Thom Andersen is impressively forensic. That goes without saying. This isn’t just a video essay. This isnt just a thesis. This is a journal. This a novel. Sourced and cited. Intelligent, theoretical, elaborate and persuasive. 

  He knows the gaffs. He knows the continuity errors. The inconsistencies. The minuscule difference you’d only be able to spot if…

• 

  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus <3] ★★★★½ 10

  The clip movie apotheosis of material historiographic montage. A sprawling visual essay truly befitting its topic. There is lots and lots to get into and get out of this movie, and critics far smarter and more qualified than myself have certainly done so and will continue to do so. What i dig about it, beyond its idiosyncratic and personal vantage point, are little things, like the love given to Messiah Of Evil, or the stunningly argued defense of Blade Runner as a near-utopian vision of a thriving multicultural, walkable metropolis free of traffic jams and corporate sterility. If you are interested in the how and why and when and where and what of film and/or Los Angeles, this is intoxicating…

• 

  Review by eddie ★★★★★

  each time i watch this i've seen a few more of the films referenced and understand a bit more of the cultural critique, and its one of the only films in which i see my own growth as a viewer reflected. essential, even if i still think the valley gets short-changed.

• 

  Review by Matthew Christman ★★★

  "Is there any other city where the police put their motto in quotation marks?"

  Damn, that's a great line. It's too bad there aren't more of them. For a three-hour explication of Los Angeles on film, there's a relative lack of extended, textured arguments. For instance, the difference between "high tourist" and "low tourist" directors seems to come down to "likes LA, doesn't like LA," and since Andersen never really advances a heuristic for viewing the city, a lot of his critiques come off as gripes or frustrated civil boosterism. But that doesn't blunt the power of the images: the section on the extinct downtown neighborhood of Bunker Hill is downright revelatory.

  Also, dude sounds just like Billy Bob Thornton.