Popular reviews

• 

  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 78

  92/100

  Holy fuck. Not really sure what I was expecting with Resident Evil: Retribution, but if you would've told me before I began this series run-through that Paul W.S. Anderson created a stunning inverse of the Resident Evil franchise, and as a result, a recognition of the artificiality well past the point of mere escapism, I would've laughed in your face. But then again, if watching these films over the past few days has taught me anything, it's that Anderson builds worlds, set-pieces, and images like no one else today. Like a series of freely expanding paintings, his Resident Evil films (1,4, and 5) are the finished result of pure expression; a shot-by-shot playbook of what cinema can be, and…

• 

  Review by Patrick Willems ★★ 12

  Every time Albert Wesker comes back after dying in the previous movie I automatically deduct half a star

• 

  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 6

  "Where you were was just a detailed recreation, nothing more. It goes on for a few city blocks, that's all..."

  The hyper-conceptualist post-modern masterpiece of the 21st & probably Anderson's best movie thus far - after Afterlife's almost wholly formalist work here finally PWSA culminates and progresses an entire body of ideas and politics simmering since Shopping. Like his best work it most closely resembles his favorite director, Fritz Lang, but this is like Lang chopped up, spewed out and reconstituted into something wholly new and immediate for the 21st century. Here is a world where the world itself does not exist - the only thing that can be trusted to be actually physical is a series of grids and corridors…

• 

  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 5

  "None of this is real."
  "... It is to her."

  Technology eats man…Woman inherits the earth. A conceptually & emotionally abstract remix of the franchise, and its iconography, as a way of meditating on the power/value of images & artifice. So funny that PWSA took a nerd IP and just made Matrix sequels with his hot wife.

• 

  Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★★ 4

  "It's like a camera. Point and shoot."

  damn

• 

  Review by pd187 ★★★★ 2

  in 8th grade i knew this redneck dirtbag kid named log4n and when he wasnt ask-jeevesing porno in the school library he kept his nose buried in doom & resident evil novelizations, the only books he ever read. one day on the copier i found a 2 page printout of a story he typed up where barely-disguised versions of him & his mudridin, skoal-dippin hick buddies wield chrome-plated glocks & taekwondo moves to merc 10000 zombies & rescue horny carmen electra lookalikes w/ big titties me & my friends passed this 2-page story around for years til the end of high school when it literally fell apart from getting read so many times,....im glad to see hes still getting work

• 

  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 2

  I kind of have to choose to tune into this wavelength whereas some folks are either adamantly against it or instinctively with it. To me it's so packed with incident that it feels like its immersed in a complicated continuity but really isn't. Instead it's blissfully anti-narrative, contrived successfully to hop from fight scene to fight scene without a lot of filler. And why not? That go-here-do-this-now-fight structure coupled with Anderson's symmetrical compositions and action-pose frames somehow give it the dramatic weight of the cut scenes I used to get so wrapped up in when I was deep in a great game, where every narrative beat was played like it was the most life-altering development imaginable.

• 

  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★★ 35

  Hoop-Tober, year three, film #6:

  "Concentrate.
  It's just like a camera.
  Point, and shoot."

  Holy fucking hell.
  I understand now, guys.
  I finally understand.

• 

  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  “It is like a camera, point and shoot”. Sliding through virtual images, creating new worlds, the more unreal the better. Every image charged with callbacks from previous films from Aliens through The Host to every other Resident Evil entry. One just tries to find news to give life to those undead images. Some o the finest corridor scenes this side of Serene Velocity. The aesthetics are different but this keep making me think of Tony Scott late movies and how charged they are with the idea of living through detritus images. This is the least horror film of the series living pretty much though straight action but in some ways the most, every set, every body just another kind of…

• 

  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus <3] ★★★★★ 15

  one of those art-history truisms taught in school the superior reality-reproducing capacities of the photograph created a crisis in the why and the how of painting, ultimately liberating it from the need to reproduce reality at all, allowing it to dwell within itself, subject only to material constraint and the perceptual constraints of the viewer. as cinema challenged opera, video games challenge cinema's status as the totalizing artwork, folding every other material practice into a grand unifying whole, reorganizing narrative around the subjectivity and agency of someone not formally inside of the narrative at all, whose motions and decisions ultimately are what the narrative is, not a single narrative, but a broken, iterative, overlapping, contradictory set of narratives all of…

• 

  Review by Jordan Gerrard ★★½ 5

  NOTHING IN THIS SERIES MAKES ANY SENSE!!!!!

  BUT I CAN'T STOP STARING AT MILLA JOVOVICH!!

• 

  Review by esther 3

  "It's real to her."

  Imagine thinking these films are bad, particularly this absolute masterpiece.