Popular reviews

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 6

  boorman takes one of those ruthlessly bleak classic noir stories but realizes it with borderline experimental stylistic flourishes that create a strange, hypnotic atmosphere out of the genres cliches; deliriously and single-mindedly lumbering from crime movie beat to the next in a series of dreamy flashbacks, bizarre lightshows, imposing architecture, fractured cutting and violent impulses. god lee marvin.

  full discussion on episode 137 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★ 7

  79/100

  Key word being "blank." This was such a bizarre moment in American film history, never to be repeated; for a limited time only, studio's bottom-line concerns about maintaining viewer identification were suspended. I'd vaguely recalled Marvin doing his typical badass thing, but Walker actually comes across here as wearily put-upon, like a man determined to get reimbursed for a mistaken charge on his credit card. (It's a running "joke" that none of the baddies can fathom why he'd expend so much energy to recover the relatively paltry sum of money that was stolen from him.) The deliberate absence of almost any context leaves us watching a singleminded void wreak meaningless havoc, culminating in a mysteriously unresolved ending that declines…

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  Review by Todd Gaines ★★★★ 38

  Lee Marvin as Walker doing shit you would expect Lee Marvin to do in a film about what happens when you screw the wrong badass outta $93,000. Bang! Bang! Harmonica. The pokey. Best mate John Vernon. Simple heist. Backstab. Alcatraz? Mutual agreement. The way Lee Marvin walks. Daddy's home. Pill popper. Happy drunk. Wedding ring. Used cars. Test drive. Tooting your own horn. Remember you should always buckle up for safety motherfucker. Lee Marvin's authoritative voice. Car killer. Psychedelic screaming. Delicious Angie Dickinson. The Organization? Unpenatratable penthouse. High-tech telescope. Capt. Spaulding worked at a hotel? Blinded by the kitty. Distress call. Elevator trickeration. Erotic touching. ScarJo and that hottie from True Detective look great naked but I'm sorry they ain't…

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½

  Revenge subsumed into corporate policy. A surrealist dystopia about noir's terminator on a meaningless mission.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★ 1

  Kiss Me Deadly 10 years later. Capital goes upward mobile, and the libertarian thug is our only alternative left. All the new wave tics hide one of the ugliest most abrasive hearts in all movies.

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸 ★★★★½ 7

  SOME SPOILERS

  Turn your sound up. Right up.

  Now put this on.

  www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkYZFGMNDOI

  Now THAT is how you do a film scene.

  John Boorman's crime thriller, which sees Lee Marvin famously stomping around California looking for the $93,000 that John Vernon and Sharon Acker unwisely diddled him out of during a heist on Alcatraz that sees him left for dead, is very much a Boorman take on the late 60s crime thriller.

  It has its surreal moments and occasional art film pretensions. It faffs around occasionally with a fractured timeline as well. But with Marvin absolutely belting it out of the park in the lead role, Point Blank has no choice but to be a fantastic neo(ish)-noir thriller, whether Boorman…

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  Review by nadine smith ★★★★½ 2

  at a certain point this just becomes a jacques tati movie about how hard it is to get paid as a freelancer (the scene with lee marvin furiously turning ofd appliances, all the hellish urban non-places, lee marvin towering over everything....). interesting to think about this as a sort of halfway point between actual noir—which this feels so  indebted to—and something like THE LONG GOODBYE or INHERENT VICE. those movies are revisionist in character and plotting while this is considerably more revisionist in terms of structure, style, and montage and largely plays by the rules of story and character type to the point of meaninglessness (to the benefit of the movie, which is about how nothing matters and everything, especially money, is fake). the flashback/flash forward reminds of roeg but is so much better than everything i've seen by him. i love how the end circles back to the beginning; genre is a laboratory experiment repeated over and over again

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★ 2

  "Cell. Prison cell."

  There have been nearly 50 years of crime movies since this came out, a never-ending cascade of "how did you get in here?," "where's my money?" "did you kill him?" "kill him," "I killed him," "he killed her," "she killed him," "the money's in the bag," "the run is different but the drop is the same," "he's in the penthouse apartment, it's like Fort Knox," "it's the cops," "he's a cop," "he's not a cop," "that motherfucker is a cop," "call the cops," "no cops," "cops!" "I thought you were dead," "he's dead," "she's dead," "he's dead, he just doesn't know it yet," "somebody has to PAY," "SOMEBODY has to pay," "where's the car?" "Stay in the…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

  Deftly mixes high and low arthouse (Godard at his poppiest hangs with Antonioni in hollow but charged frames) with anticipatory approaches to storytelling and mood that foresee films ranging from the angriest of New Hollywood's political works to DON'T LOOK NOW. The exchange of "Hey, what's my last name?" "What's my first name?" captures the longing underneath the most nihilistic of film genres.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

  already dead.

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  Review by laird ★★★★★

  Vengeance is a prison.

  This shares with CHARLEY VARRICK that distinct feeling that it's about identity and meaning getting swallowed up by Darwinian capitalism. Bleak. Visually thrilling. Lee Marvin is a force.

  This morning I had to go to the post office to deal with filing a claim about a package that was stolen from in front of my apartment. Maybe it was that experience that had me thinking it would be fun to re-imagine POINT BLANK as the story of a normal guy just trying to get a refund from a giant bureaucratic or corporate entity. "I want my money (back)!"

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus] ★★★★★ 1

  More than anything else, 'Point Blank' reminds me of an Anglo-American analogue to Seijun Suzuki masterpieces like 'Branded To Kill' and 'Tokyo Drifter'. Discontinuous sound/image mapping, reflections in reflections, shadows framing shadows. Everything bought and paid for and sold out. Lee Marvin is both an agent of vengeance and a patsy, corroded and obsolete in the face of modern management techniques. In a world where corruption is the status quo, befuddlement in low-level thugs is confused with honor. John Boorman's run of straight ruling everything up through at least the mid-eighties begins right here, as well as giving himself over to a corpus of films without a solution wherein every attempt to do so only digs further inside.