Popular reviews

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  Review by Spencer Williams ★★★ 32

  Claire Denis watching Interstellar: hmmm yés bùt whéré is thé cúm!!!!

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★ 25

  Semen-terstellar

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 14

  In many respects, the mesmerizing and elusive “High Life” is a first for writer-director Claire Denis: the first of her films to be shot in English, the first of her films to be set in space, and the first of her films to follow Juliette Binoche inside a metal chamber that’s referred to as “The Fuckbox,” where the world’s finest actress — playing a mad scientist aboard an intergalactic prison ship on a one-way trip to Earth’s nearest black hole — straddles a giant dildo chair and violently masturbates in a scene that’s endowed with the tortured energy of a Cirque du Soleil routine.

  Needless to say, “High Life” isn’t your average science-fiction movie. In fact, Denis rejects the genre…

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  Review by gal pacino ★★★½ 7

  an unholy mixture of both nihilism and optimism that only claire denis could pull off. it's a literal dog-eat-dog world out there, and the awful events happening in this film (systemic abuse of prisoners, rape, negative health effects from radiation, deadly experimentation) are happening every day in real life. in one early scene, the ethical implications of sending prisoners on a suicide mission to a black hole are reduced to dispassionate conversations between citizens on Earth, much like our reality. we check the news on twitter/in the paper/wherever and discuss with friends over a cup of coffee, angry but comfortable, while the people the stories are about suffer helplessly.

  to be honest, i felt numb when i walked out of…

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  Review by siobhan ★★★★★ 8

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  nooo robert pattinson don’t fly into a black hole ur so sexy aha

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  Review by deah ★★★★★ 2

  rob pattinson baby talk asmr

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  Review by anthony ★★½ 2

  can't believe they missed the perfect opportunity to use the tagline "in space, no one can hear you cream"

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  Review by Karsten ★★★★ 9

  Arriving veery fashionably late to this party BUT. This is way more brilliant than I thought it'd be. According to Denis this is her most heart-warming film and it's apparently, at its core, about love. That changed much of how I looked at this thing. She takes something like love, something that, to me, is codependent with time (for reasons that would require a separate essay) and places this "love" story in a setting like space where one could argue time doesn't exist for our characters. Not to mention our characters are in a position where instead of prioritizing work they prioritize love. Denis blends these ideas and uses them to ask how crucial love is to survival and gives us enough to not really have a clear answer, as we shouldn't. This is probably super obvious but I thought that was sick. It also looked great!

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★ 3

  melancholy with dread filling up every corner, but i can’t say i wasn’t transfixed. and the simple concentrated concept of being lost and horny in space... her MIND

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  Review by KYK ★★★★ 3

  claire denis understands that the most open spaces can make the most oppressive prisons, especially when the autonomy over your body is at stake

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  Review by kevinyang ★★½ 8

  Very disappointing. Shoves the most interesting element of the story into the final 15-20 minutes, which is a shame because it fills the remaining time with nonsense of the highest caliber. After a decently compelling start, it descends into a haphazard bombardment of images that only have the pretense of saying anything about sexuality and imprisonment. The flashbacks are jarring, the dialogue is overly expository, and the entire project comes together in the most lifeless manner possible. Pattinson, one of the most exciting actors alive, is unable to do much with the material. Certain *shocking scenes* only pay lip service to the aforementioned themes but don’t actually interrogate then beyond intense surface level displeasure, this because it’s all too shakily constructed to lay the foundation for anything deeper (not that it needs to, but it sure is trying).

  Denis is right when she says it isn’t sci fi, but it’s hardly anything else either.

  GRADE: C+

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 6

  Choice and coercion. Claire Denis took a Tarkovskian space-horror film, blended it with prison exploitation and transgressive nightmares, and screamed into the void. There is, quite possibly, no single consensual act in this film between any two people. There is no consent between prisoners and captors, nor between prisoners. Monte's refusal to engage in sexual activity is not some innocent purity act, but a symbolic gesture of self-control in a hell made of rape, torture, and medical experimentation.

  Peoples' bodies are taken from them in almost every conceivable fashion. Every choice is an illusion, contextualized with violence and despair; Denis' film, whether intended or not, denounces prisons and the dehumanization of prisoners. It denounces exploration at the cost of human…