Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★ 6

  "..and neoliberalism, which is of course a result of individualism." - Pietro Marcello, in his interview with Jordan Cronk from the latest Cinema Scope

  Maybe more on this later, but Martin Eden strikes me as either deceptively easy-to-watch, or rather that it is quite accessible, not quite formally challenging, but also that it's yet offered some of the most genuinely challenging questions of any movie I've seen this year - are art and politics fundamentally incompatible? Is art doomed to be what it has been historically prior to the 20th century - a marginally useless bourgeois plaything - children's toys for aristocrats? It took me a couple days to realize how much I liked this film, this is in part…

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  Review by jourdain searles 3

  hot insufferable man becomes more hot and insufferable, has unclear leftist politics

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 7

  100

  Director Pietro Marcello has described his Martin Eden as "a child of the Mediterranean" - translating a figure of early 20th century American labor into an eternalized portrait of Italy's history. He is at once birthed and cursed by The Sea, and ceaseless in the romantic ebb and flow of the present-day. This is a grand, scattered collage of feeling, and almost certainly an instant classic. Watching it, I felt the foundation of its expansive canvas solidified by sweeping statements and swooning gestures. It's shaped with love and passion and the persistence to rise above the self-pity of individualism, but at once succumbing to its temptations and decadence.

  Luca Marinelli's performance, one of the greatest in modern screen history…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★ 2

  Jack London — an avowed socialist who found himself struggling to reconcile his political ideals with his personal success — intended for “Martin Eden” to be a damning critique of the individualism that spurred his fame. “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild” had earned the low-born writer an invitation into high society, but he struggled to square the untamed working man he was with the celebrated author he’d suddenly become; still at heart the same person he had always been, London was disgusted to see how differently the ruling class now looked at someone they once despised. What self-serving bullshit! Why should anyone beg for a member of the elite to throw them their own private lifeline when…

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ 2

  Martin Eden from Martin Eden is hot

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  The position of the artist in a cultural industry, a tale of self-anihilation. A movie split in a series of twos starting with London's dramatic sweep and Marcello experimental background and following a series of similar impossible doubles (obverture towards world, alienation from it, commitment/individualism, a bourgeois and radical educations, the certainty of an old aristrocatic world and our knowledge of its future disappearance). Marcelo doesn't want to bring any of those elements together but operate at their violent crashes. The movie dedication to its drama and desire to locate it into a larger world through Marcello's use of incorporate footage to fissures it, slowly allowing the sentimental education to be contaminated by a sense of 20th century Italian history is one of the more radical formal gambits I've seen lately. It is sorta like someone blend Straub/Huillet and Visconti together and refused to accept their incompatibility while also making a movie about it.

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★ 2

  “Looking back it’s embarrassing to recognise the degree to which my intellectual curiosity those first two years of college paralleled the interests of various women I was attempting to get to know. Marx and Marcuse, so I had something to say to the long-legged socialist who lived in my dorm; Fanon and Gwendolyn Brooks for the smooth-skinned sociology major who never gave me a second look; Foucault and Woolf for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black."

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  Review by nabeel ★★½

  me: i watched this movie for the plot 

  the plot: luca marinelli

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  Review by Sara Clements ★★★★★ 3

  I'm absolutely floored by Martin Eden. A poetic, dream-like film that feels like something out of Italy's golden age of neorealism. It certainly looks at the changes to the Italian psyche in the same way with the discussion on class struggle at its center. An enthralling and gorgeously shot rags to riches tale of how a man's obsession with the bourgeoisie and his ambition to become a famous writer sends him off the rails. Luca Marinelli's performance blew me away – one of the best of the year. I really hope this gets a Best International Feature nomination.

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  Review by Emma Stefansky

  never in my LIFE have i seen a man so HANDSOME

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★½

  Blue is the wealthiest color.

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  Review by Mike Thorn 1

  This is a suitably vexing engagement with Manichean thought, contending with the necessity for collectivist politics via the individualist act of artistic expression. Fitting, then, that the film develops its ideas primarily through the moral descent of a single character, whose well-intentioned pursuit of literary honesty leads him somehow to the hell of social Darwinism. Of course, the title character's arc is bound up by the perils of a capitalist culture industry, which privileges commercial appeal over ontological "truth." In this sense, the film presents the thesis that art itself cannot think outside politics.

  Ultimately, Martin Eden offers a real-world expression of Lucas's philosophy as articulated in the Star Wars prequels, namely by exposing the ruptures in moral dualism. Marcello…