Popular reviews

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ½ 5

  There are those rare films I don't fully comprehend but because I felt a strong connection and because it moved me I feel compelled to unravel its complexities!

  This is NOT one of those films!

  I don't get it.. more importantly I don't care if I ever get it!

  Actually the story is not deep or complex at all, it only appears to be darn right confounding due to the extremely weak narrative that can be best described as a HOT MESS! The treatment of the subject matter was superficial at best!

  How they managed to turn such an interesting premise into something that went beyond the city limits of watchable and into no man's land aka dullsville is beyond…

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  Review by Tasha Robinson ★★ 2

  Such an interesting and relevant concept. Such amazing and exciting animation. Such a daring performance. And such terrible, incoherent writing. This is such a frustrating movie, because it's easy to see what it could have been in another, better draft: a cogent, heartbreaking story about escapism, and artistry, and immortality. Instead, it's a confusion of people doing things that seem precisely against their best interests, on behalf of hyperbolically abusive idiots, for reasons that are never explained. It feels a good deal like a Ralph Bakshi movie, both in the wild energy and experimental qualities, and in its incoherence. There's no consistency of vision in terms of what's going on, what the future world means, even necessarily who's in the…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 7

  36th Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch

  Okay, maybe I'm overthinking this, but why do I get the impression that this film is less about the companies and more on the two heads of Miramax and Paramount at the time, Harvey Weinstein and Brad Grey? Two men accused of sexual assault and abuse of power, one convicted and the other deceased before facing any consequences? Even as an intern at the other's company, Grey and Harvey became close friends. Maybe that's part of the film's criticism, or maybe the identity and digital processing and exploitation of these characters replacing the performers is just a ruse?

  As for the picture itself, I first appreciated the very peculiar animation with a…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★

  Ari Folman, please report to Pixar immediately. they need you.

  fascinating update of Stanislaw Lem's novel fits celebrity culture and our current vision of future tech like a glove, but i'm not entirely convinced that the acid freakout of a 2nd part is a proper catalyst of the film's richest ideas. Max Richter's reliably beautiful score does a lot of heavy lifting... but crazy / beautiful respect for Robin Wright for diving into this head-first. will revisit.

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  Review by Ryan Daniel ★★★½

  I have never seen a movie like this. I’m not gonna go into detail but this movie is mostly animated, with live action chunks at the beginning and end. The animation is really fun and unique; it clearly took a lot of inspiration from old style animators like Max Fleischer, in a similar vein that Cup Head did, but not quite as prominently.

  I love what they did with the story too, it seems complicated at first but it eventually just boils down to a mother’s relationship with her son on a path somewhere in between narrative and a stream of consciousness. You’d think two hours of old style animation and a borderline narrative structure would drag, but I had a really good time with this.

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  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★★ 6

  Viewed with the Amazing Edith's *Collab Film Group*.

  There was this agent once who made his mistakes yet found his saving grace in an actress, a woman who made her fame and pushed it away for family. This agent would share his story to her at the dusk of his days and at the dawning of a new world. His faded career is a catalyst for hubris, shame, coming of age, and passion while his client (also upon a faded career) sits upon a framework of technology that is meant to capture her humanity. The live action of The Congress ends with this lengthy, humanizing monologue before we are swept up into a phantasmagoric sequence of other-worldly animation.

  As the new world…

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  Review by Boy Roarbison [fka Nag Champion] ★★★★ 2

  Narrative be damned! Far and away one of the most trippy film experiences I've encountered in a long, long while. I went in knowing almost nothing, aside from my familiarity with Folman's previous work, and I was all the better for it. I cannot even begin to tell you what this film is about, what it means and what deeper conclusions might lay hidden beneath its surface. Impressive performances from Robin Wright [as herself], Harvey Keitel [he totally steals one particular scene] and Danny Huston [few actors play villainous like he does]. The animation is "far out" and your senses will be bombarded on pretty much every level a 2-D moving picture is capable of. While I expect I need an additional viewing to fully rationalize my enjoyment of it, I feel as if I have no choice but to find a place somewhere on my Best of the Year list for Ari Folman's mind-bending trip The Congress.

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★½ 7

  2nd Ari Folman (after Waltz with Bashir)

  There’s a lot of wonderful ideas at play here. It’s hard not to think of the scanning conceit as a forerunner of the Deepfake, that malignant serpent of irreality so popular since 2016. And the idea of resurrecting an actor from the dead for a new performance isn’t entirely out of the bounds of possibility either. A couple of years ago, a company got into a great deal of hot water by announcing the newest performance of one James Byron Dean, despite the fact that he’s been dead since 1955. Increasingly, the blurred line between the corporeal and the digital is not only encouraged but desirable, the natural ending of an apathy we…

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★½ 4

  Robin. This movie is a lot. Robin.

  Essentially a story about what it’s going to be like in a Web3 future.

  Like many of my species, I love gazing at Robin Wright.

  But how come when this is a live action movie Wright is mostly guiding her own fate, even as the coming future compromises her sense of self, and is presented as a thoughtful person with her own agency, but then the second this becomes an animation film she’s getting manhandled all over the place? When animated she needs to be saved, carried, healed, pawed at, explained to (to be fair - there is a ton of explain-o [mansplain-o?] in this) and then this fucking animator guy shows up...…

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  Review by Caty Alexandre ★★★★½

  I heard about this film some months ago but I didn't expect it to be released in here. When I heard that it would be I knew right away that I had to have the chance to watch it at the big screen because it looked visually appealing and the different story caught my attention too.

  The Congress is presented to us as a futuristic story about Robin Wright, the actress that plays herself. The cinema industry is not easy we all know that aging is not a good thing in Hollywood. The parts start to get smaller and start to be less and less. Beauty almost always wins in a world that sells beauty and youth for all eternity.…

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★½ 2

  There's a monologue at the end of act one of The Congress, Ari Folman's follow-up to the justly lauded Waltz With Bashir that I think is as good as any speech ever written for the cinema. It comes when Robin Wright, playing "Robin Wright", an ageing actress with a haphazard career and family life, has agreed to let herself be scanned by Miramount Studios. The scanning process will create a permanently youthful onscreen avatar of Wright, which the studio can then put to work in the kind of sexy-action-girl roles the real-life Wright has avoided.

  Anyway, Wright is led into the scanning chamber, which resembles the sort of thing Buckminster Fuller might have come up with had he embraced the…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 3

  For whatever reason, probably just an accident, this film ended up in my Ousmane Sembene folder. Stumbling upon it while looking for something to watch on the train, I thought how odd it was that he had a film come out posthumously in 2013. Of course, this isn't a Sembene film at all, not even remotely, which becomes evident as soon as the words "Robin Wright" appear on the screen, if nothing else.

  Based on a Stanislav Lem story (a promising start), it sprawls through many turns until it's unrecognizable in comparison to its starting point. The animated portion of the film looks good--at times inventive, a mixture of older animators that I enjoy, warmly non-CG--but tends to fail to…