Popular reviews

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  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 17

  Let's get this out there first:
  1. the goddamn opening credits
  2. the goddamn editing
  3. the knowledge of Rock Hudson's own personal life takes his performance to Morrissey-levels of melancholy
  4. this should be required viewing for any filmmaker wanting to experiment with handheld/found footage/other bizarre camera techniques
  5. the goddamn e d i t i n g
  6. the double meaning of the title (measure of time/2nd)
  7. appearance by the mayor from JAWS

  There are about a hundred ways to approach interpreting this film, and that alone is admirable, but what makes this a perfect movie is that even without intellectual dissection, it is an incredible science fiction/horror experience. It's layered, it's complicated, but thinking is not…

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★½ 16

  "The years I've spent trying to get all the things I was told were important - that I was supposed to want! Things! Not people... or meaning. Just things. And California was the same. They made the decisions for me all over again and they were the same things, really. It's going to be different from now on. A new face and a name. I'll do the rest. I know it's going to be different.

  Every two days or so I have a long, obsessive episode where I'm unflinchingly focused on one problem for hours and come to the same conclusion: that my problems could all be fixed if I were able to just have a "new" life. I could…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 1

  not really happy with how this turned out, but too tired to nudge it in the right direction... also, you should probably watch the movie before reading this. not like *immediately* before, but maybe at some point in your life.

  It’s appropriate, and perhaps nearly necessary, that John Frankenheimer’s “Seconds” is a very good film that’s dying to be great. The final film in Frankenheimer’s informal “Paranoia Trilogy,” (the other installments being “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Seven Days in May”), “Seconds” is the best and certainly the most enduringly resonant of the three, in part because it’s less of a political thriller than it is a resoundingly human one, less concerned with power than it is hope, regret and resignation.…

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  Review by Todd Gaines ★★★★½ 16

  A middle-aged businessman fakes his death and is given a new identity by a mysterious company and a new face that is a dead ringer for Rock Hudson and that's just the beginning of the craziness in John Frankenheimer's so way ahead of its time psychological thriller. Eyeball. Creepy phone call. Latin? Bedroom lies. Fatty's sideburns at the dry cleaners. Meat wagon. Trippy walk. Silent scream. Bootleg Grim Reaper. Fried Chicken is yummy. Too real home movies. The wise old fuck with the spiffy hat kinda reminds me of Scatman from The Shining. Nip/Tuck. Freaky mask. Mirror shock. Instant Rock Hudson. Davalo's mustache. Freedom flight. Helpful John. The cinematography of James Wong Howe ain't no joke. Pretty painting. Smoking in…

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  Review by nick ★★★★

  Seconds is such a strange fruit that stands out beautifully among its contemporary American horror classics. With its experimental camera work, absurd storyline, and a timeless theme, Seconds has become a steady horror staple, with its iconic scene compositions and twisted premise referenced countless times in recent works, from Being John Malkovich, to A Cure for Wellness.

  Seconds tells an extremely ambitious sci-fi story that's simply ahead of its time -- an agency recruits clients who want a new identity for themselves, albeit with consequences. In a way it's akin to Godard's Alphaville, as both aced a grand story with limited budget and distinctive style. For Seconds, the end result is a patient journey that's both mesmerizing and bone-chilling, with…

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★ 2

  I think we underrate John Frankenheimer

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  Review by Mike Ginn ★★★★½ 2

  Cool tidbit from the commentary. They couldn’t close Grand Central while filming there, and were having issues with people gathering and looking into the camera. So director John Frankenheimer set up a false camera on the other side of the station, gave the film’s writer a microphone, and had him direct a male model and a playboy bunny in a fake romance scene. The crowd gathered over there and he got to film the real scenes.

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½ 1

  Makes pretty clear why it was booed at Cannes, as all those French intellectuals who were turning away from “bourgeoisie life” were probably not expecting a film that basically slaps their lifestyle in their face. Last year’s viewing of The Manchurian Candidate was an exciting but somewhat disappointing revisit from when I had originally watched it in 2004, and found myself asking why that had become a classic* as opposed to this cookie filled with arsenic. Few films are filed with such vitriol despair for the American Dream, and not just the one of the middle class life of the 1950s that Hamilton realizes was essentially empty, but also the 1960s free spirit life as well. The grapes sequence literally…

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★ 1

  74/100

  Begins and ends so unforgettably that the comparatively flaccid midsection, in which Tony Wilson butts heads with the incipient counterculture (and gets the idea to start Factory Records? CROSS-POLLINATION MOVIE HUMOR), tends to fade from memory. As Scott Tobias observes, it's essentially a bloated Twilight Zone episode, though a good deal of the padding is welcome—Frankenheimer and Carlino tease out the scenario's details with delectable deliberation, even though that requires withholding Hudson for nearly half the movie in a sort of reverse-Psycho stunt. James Wong Howe goes nuts, of course, but in a more diverse and disciplined way than I'd remembered, alternating the fisheye grotesquerie and wacky chin-cam with stark, melancholy compositions that look like the inspiration for Gregory Crewdson's entire career. And the overall pessimism is somehow invigorating, if only because most movies (and novels, and etc.) argue so strenuously for the possibility of redemption and rebirth, even when it's only Pyrrhic. None of that here.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ 1

  Close-ups have never been less personal than they are in SECONDS: nearly every face seen in isolation belongs to someone else, a given mask that consumes the host. This was a banner year for jaundiced visions of the American Dream, from an EDM-inspired, fauvist teen flick to an outright flesh parade from America's best living filmmaker, but SECONDS arguably goes further than any of them in vivisecting the hollow, indeterminate goal of the American Dream, and how people will take any chance to chase desires they cannot even identify, and how exposure to the inevitable failure of the pursuit of an undefined goal destroys them. The finale, which exposes the shadow company at the heart of the film as perhaps the only true fulfillment of that dream, recycling its clients to furnish new ones in a perpetual profit device, is so horrifying that James Wong Howe's impeccably hallucinatory cinematography is almost secondary in generating a mood of unease.

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★½

  One of the coolest and scariest opening credit sequences of all time. Plus there's an extended nude grape stomping wine orgy scene.

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  Review by BananaPudding ★★★★½ 10

  "So this is what happens to the dreams of youth"
  "I guess I never had a dream"

  Call it kafkaesque, proto-Lynchian, an adaptation of a nonexistent Phillip K. Dick novel, or a long-lost extended episode of the twilight zone; whatever seconds is it sure is one of the absolute pinnacles of the New Hollywood movement - that is both timeless in its theme and ahead of its time in its technical prowess. It's existentially terrifying in its depiction of the disillusionment of the middle age and the idea of rebirth into an idealized person obscured by the American dream, and the absolute stellar cameraworks hone in on its theme perfectly: from the voyeuristic & claustrophobic pov shots, warped & distorted wide angles,…