Popular reviews

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 11

  The price of true prophecy is madness and catastrophe. This film is prophecy. A movie within a movie within a movie that we are all inside of dreaming of one another simultaneously. The single greatest Philip K Dick adaptation that's not based on any of his books. A radiant mess the director flew too close to and was cast down back to Earth for. The drug-induced, death dream of a Fallujah-scarred veteran that conjured the world we are living in today. Friendly fire, friendly fire, friendly fire.

  The resurgence of Marx and the Antichrist, the merging of celebrity and pornography, an omnipresent bipolar surveillance state comprised of both shady government agencies and 24/7 personal streaming, racist police murders on viral…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 5

  "Join us for an in-depth discussion of the penetrating issues facing society today... Issues like abortion, terrorism, crime, poverty, social reform, quantum teleportation, teen horniness, and war."

  This played in theatres 10 years ago and people were still surprised by president Trump

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  Review by cameron fetter ★★★★★ 1

  A movie about how 9/11 had sex with America’s brain

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  Review by Cole ★★★★★ 15

  I've said before that this is the best film of its decade, and I stand by that statement. Yes, some of the magic has dulled by this viewing (I've seen it some 30 or forty time in the five years since it's release) but it still stands above its peers as an utter masterpiece.

  Last month I saw the documentary Room 237, an examination of The Shining. One of the points that film made was in the care devoted to the set design by Kubrick, to the point where they show pictures of him hand-placing each can on the shelves in the food stores. The general idea is that that care to even the smallest of details is what set…

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  Review by Adam Friedland 5

  Stiffler is a good actor and he should have gotten more work.

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe 10

  There never has, and never will be, a more “post-9/11” movie. Definitely more in the “I like this” camp than the “too incomprehensible” camp, but I see both sides. Feels like the movie you get if a veteran took the Wachowskis to task for their violence and they really internalized the criticism, and then made Mullholland Drive. Some of the worst keying I’ve ever seen but that’s not a dig, I’m sure it was an unfortunate limitation, the budget in this is stretched very well! (Cannes Cut)

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  Review by Will Sloan

  This movie is a big box of loaded and evocative sounds and images, from which you are invited to assemble your own meaning. It gains a few more fans every year for how its very Bush-era concerns about the intersection of capitalism, right-wing politics, and the surveillance state with celebrity and influencer culture stays relevant. There are ideas and aesthetics here that would be at home in a 2006-era "Bushisms" website, and stuff about live-streaming, faux-progressive tech barons, and ineffectual left-wing activist groups that feels like it was written today, and 2006 and 2023 quickly bleed into each other. The aesthetic is relentlessly ugly and tacky throughout, and while virtually all of the characters are fools, Kelly doesn’t distance himself…

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  Review by Carol Grant ★★★★½ 3

  ~THE CANNES CUT~

  Q&A Moderator: So this movie is very prescient, is that something you intend or...?

  Cinematographer: Well, I remember when we were making Donnie Darko, producers were telling us "there's no way a jet engine just falls off a plane, that's implausible". And then, while we were shooting, a news story came out of an engine falling out of an airplane in the middle of the Pacific. [To Kelly] So your work just seems to have that way of predicting the future [chuckles]

  Richard Kelly: I'm gonna write a movie where everyone falls in love and has a happy ending.

  Everyone: [laughs]

  Kelly: [laughs/cries]

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 6

  (Cannes cut)

  "All the Pilgrims did was ruin the American Indian orgy of freedom."

  People when praising Southland Tales often talk about how it is prescient, but part of what remains so valuable about it was what has always been: how agressive 2006 it all is from The Killers to The Rock at his wannabe Schwarzenegger peak having sex with Buffy while Stiffler ascends to heaven while as much fictional variation on Bush II era stuff can be throw away at the screen to see what it sticks. All three Kelly features are pop historical phantasmagorias set around the twlight of the last three major Republican presidencies and obsessed with finding cosmic fiction ways to process national trauma. The one…

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  Review by sarah squirm ★★★★ 5

  if Don’t Look Up went hard in the paint….
  respect to anyone who steals the Llorando scene from Mullholland Drive…
  crazy that i watched this movie mere minutes after finishing VALIS… 🤯
  never thought i’d say this but…. moby tore it…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★★ 39

  "Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more futuristic than they originally predicted."

  This is it. This is it right here. A throwaway line from a porn star now running a reality show, yet a key to understanding the film as a whole.

  Southland Tales is a film about the future, but not just any future; no, it is about the future when it becomes warped and twisted by our perceptions of what the future should look like along with what the future will likely be and how our collective outlook moulds that final picture. The outcome? A cutting-edge society that has learned how to harness things such as ocean waves for perpetual motion machines that result…

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½ 3

  UPDATE: This became this book . The published went under but contact me by email for e-version.

  Revisited this for my thesis on apocalyptic narratives and film noir. This film currently takes up an entire chapter. Since I finished my draft tonight, here's a small excerpt from that:

  If we can identify a discourse that Kelly appears to be working through, I would argue his main point is saturation. Like the way low culture overtakes high culture in Kiss Me Deadly, it is that there is simply too much culture and images to handle, here in the form of an all media event. Steven Shaviro notes, “Properly cinematic images are intermixed with a barrage of home video footage, internet and…