Popular reviews

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  Review by BeardofTsu ★★★★ 2

  Jennifer Connelly and Virginia Madsen are the main reason to watch this Dennis Hopper-directed neo-noir. They're both so damn sexy but Virginia Madsen is so sizzling hot that she almost melts the screen! Blackmailing Don Johnson with that accent and shaving her legs while on the phone really hits the spot. This is perhaps one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen everyone is sweating buckets clothes just drenched in sweat in this pressure cooker of a story. Simmers quite nicely until it finally explodes. It's an above-average neo-noir with good performances from the three main players even Don Johnson finds his level as sleazy and extremely horny criminal Harry Maddox. Loved the score and ending too! Hopper is at his very best here with the direction, well worth checking out this underrated gem.

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  Review by Steve G 🇵🇸 🇾🇪 ★★★½

  The 80s and 90s Neo-Noir Project

  A bit of an old favourite from my younger days, but I think mostly due to the HUUUUGE crush I had on Jennifer Connelly there for about 2 years.

  Pretty much anything she was in that I saw around that time became a favourite of some description, even Inventing The Abbotts, which was a boring load of old crap. Mind you, that had the added bonus of having Liv Tyler in it as she became my next huge crush over the next 2 years. It was a passing of the torch, if you will.

  Of course, Connelly is still absolutely stunning both in The Hot Spot and in the present day, but this rewatch…

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★

  a liquor soaked, cigarette stained, sexually charged sweaty southern masterclass, hopper's less interested in making a cohesive or tense noir and far more interested in just establishing mood and filming people fuck, which makes it the least tense but most thrilling noir. it stretches an interesting 90 minute story into a 130 minute epic and really does nothing with the extra time but spend miscellaneous sequences with his cast, gets more plot heavy in its third act as expected but it's refreshing to see a movie that wants you to relax and soak in its world, and also look at don johnson's ass. plus it's the horniest goddamn movie imaginable, it's not played for camp which somehow works here but…

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  Review by Andy Summers ★★★ 5

  Have you ever watched a film just to see one of your favourite actors or actresses shed their clothes? Just me then. The Hot Spot was one of the legendary hellraiser Dennis Hopper's directorial ventures, and his neo-noir had three very attractive leads to propel this steamy Texas set love-triangle. Don Johnson was still a hot property back in 1990 following his five year stint as Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice, and his fame and time in the spotlight had clearly led to delusions that he could actually act. Virginia Madsen and Jennifer "God she was hot" Connelly however, both play their parts as equally different manipulators of Johnson's affections. We get a robbery, blah blah blah, some dialogue, and…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★

  sorry dennis hopper, i don't believe anyone would actually be dumb enough to cheat on the incarnated angel of beauty that is jennifer connelly

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  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★½

  Dennis Hopper behind the camera feels like a totally different beast from seeing him on the screen: if there's anything that The Hot Spot can really prove. But I think the greatest thing about The Hot Spot is the fact that Hopper feels incredibly committed to making this into a noir in which every character in this film is constantly making bad decisions one after the other - and Hopper really plays into the sleaziness so well, it suits the pulp nature of the source material he's adapting from.

  Plus, it's just an all around gorgeous movie from beginning to end.

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★ 3

  Is there a greater year for a director to have two films than Dennis Hopper having Catchfire and The Hot Spot both release in 1990? I get why people balk at the 130 minute runtime on this one - the narrative sustains barely 2/3 of that - but there's few things I relish more than moody, sweaty, dusty neo-noirs where characters predominantly bullshit each other in between bed-breaking marathons and fisticuffs.

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  Review by nomenclature ★★★★★

  As a lover of genre cinema, Jennifer Connelly pretty easily has my favorite actor's filmography. With classics in every genre and a career spanning decades, ranging from regular dramatic stuff to the extremely niche, the well runs deep and so much of it is just right down my alley. Most likely it has to do with a combination of getting started at a young age and being fortunate enough to be offered the best roles, but of course some amount of taste is necessary to consistently choose good projects over the years, and I imagine our sensibilities of what constitutes "good" would be very similar.

  The Hot Spot is one of my favorites, Dennis Hopper's picturesque assemblage of various RKO…

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  Review by Jay D 's Watching ★★★

  Hopper's photography background on full display here in this neon-and-candy-coated throwback, a genuine hard-boiled dime novel on film of the sort that they had stopped making by '90 (no wonder it bombed, apart from the fact that Johnson and Madsen didn't really do publicity for it, apparently) the same year punk broke, overall - but more than retrograde, if you're familiar with Hopper, you'll recognize the streak of masculine self-loathing on full display here, in a narrative about how the little dreams of an oversized testosterone soaked ego lead inevitably to the hell of getting what you want, that, as Chris Rock put it 'Life is LONG'

  
  (Also, for a film like this to work, it has to have a soundtrack calibrated just so. This film's soundtrack NAILS it)

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  Review by DANIEL ★★★★ 1

  pros:

  - slick, stylish, maximized aesthetic that is mostly visually consistent, mostly
  - kinda has that same post-noir feel as movies like The Man Who Wasn’t There or The Last Seduction where you know everyone in the movie stays up late watching The Big Heat or some shit 
  - like holy fuck awhooga city Jennifer Connelly god damn of damns 
  - every movie like this needs William Sadler, and this one does! 

  cons: 

  - we’ve all seen this story before 
  - we’ve all see Virginia Madsen play this character before 
  - mostly consistent 

  
  all in all, a hoot! can’t believe Hopper followed this up with fucking Chasers. murder me in my fucking sleep, please.

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  Review by Sonny_Jim ★★★½ 2

  Amoral drifter Harry Madox (Don Johnson) is at a crossroads (figuratively and literally) and is trying to figure out his next move. During the course of the movie Harry is torn between two women (Virginia Madsen and Jennifer Connelly, the femme fatale and the girl next door) but is really trying to reconcile who he is with who he wants to be.

  Is Harry weak or is he strong?
  Can he only define himself by the women he's with, or can he do it on his own terms?
  Is he a bad guy, a good guy, or just someone in between?

  On the surface it's a gorgeous neo-noir but underneath this feels a bit like a mid-life crisis movie. Or…

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  Review by Kyle ★★★ 3

  The Hot Spot is a film in which the phrase "I am fucking you to death" is spoken entirely unironically, during a scene in which said act is physically taking place.

  Could've used more Jack Nance. Three stars, two of which are for each of Jennifer Connelly's eyebrows.