Popular reviews

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  Review by Ayo Edebiri

  a movie full of CHOICES

  two that I loved were the visual effects whenever someone gets fried and when Angela Bassett used her braids as a weapon during a fight sequence, that was amazing

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  Review by Cole ★★★★★ 6

  I'm about to say something fairly inflammatory, but rather than get up in arms about it, just think carefully about it and you'll realize I'm right. Ready?

  Kathryn Bigelow is better than anyone in the history of film when it comes to shooting action sequences.

  It's not just that she so great at filming action, it's that she's great at shooting every conceivable sort of action setpiece. She can do car chases, fight scenes, shootouts... hell, she made an entire film built around bomb disposal and it was one of the most arresting action films ever made.

  And if the POV robbery sequence that opens this film doesn't take your breath away, then... man, I don't know what to say.…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

  "We made it."

  Plenty of this scans dated or corny now (some of it even did at the time): the clothes, the music (Skunk Anansie!), the analog production design (physical media, how quaint) but all that gets pushed aside for Bigelow's incredible, confident realization of both the accurately predicted nominal state of near-chaos and the truly cathartic optimism at the film's core. To a lot of folks it must feel painfully naive, especially at the end, but: not many dystopian sci-fi neo-noirs are about moral imperative, people choosing to do better, zeroing the counter.

  Also another reminder, Angela Bassett, goddamn

  Discussed on Episode 62 of The Suspense is Killing Us.

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe 5

  hrrrrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm. i think kathryn bigelow is a great technical director and the pov camera stuff in this movie is incredible. i think it’s a good thriller and a fantastic idea and i wish it was more of a hit. i even think i really like the script. i just don’t think i like kathryn bigelow’s work. i wish she weren’t so fascinated with depicting grotesque, militarized violence against the marginalized, especially people of color, and if you’re gonna try and “that’s the point”-me you can kick rocks. i don’t like it! have watched plenty of other filmmakers follow similar threads without feeling my stomach sink or sensing a perverse sort of a fascination in the violence like a child magnifying…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★ 7

  This movie was made in 1995, set in 1999, centered around MiniDisc technology, and eerily prescient about some key aspects of life in 2015.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 8

  "Paranoia's just reality on a finer scale."

  Part Cameron tech-horror science-fiction apocalypse, part De Palma voyeuristic conspiratorial noir; both ingesting the technological paranoia of a Phillip K. Dick or William Gibson and the political/cultural reality of a post-Rodney King riots LA, and venomously spitting them all back out as a shot of pure sweaty, sensual and kinetic Bigelow action adrenaline.

  An intensely violent thriller about an industry of virtual sensory fantasy that's been infected by disturbingly real racist and sexist violence (interrogating our own complicity as customers paying for nasty pulp thrill escapism), and so effective at providing that shocking level of destabilizing whiplash throughout (where you’ll see a sick car stunt or frantic shootout that belongs in a Terminator…

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  Review by Rajat Suresh 4

  in the year 2000 no more jacking off, we are jacking IN

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  Review by Tasha Robinson ★★★★★ 12

  Still one of my all-time favorites, just a stunning combination of still-relevant politics, forward-thinking science fiction, a doomed relationship where the raw emotions are palpable, and Angela Bassett as a tremendous ass-kicker. The exposition and introduction of the brain-recording tech is handled so smoothly and efficiently. The cast is (almost all) top-notch and operating beautifully. The camera stunts may seem old hat today, but they were ridiculously ambitious for their era. (Kathryn Bigelow's description of how she got the opening POV sequence, presented as an extra on the DVD, is an absolutely ludicrous piece of filmmaking, involving inventing an entirely new camera and having five dudes piled on each other in the trunk of that opening car, operating the tech and providing extra on-camera hands.) I get excited about cinema all over again every time I rewatch this. I don't know why it's so criminally unavailable these days.

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  Review by Emma Stefansky 1

  I love movies that are about two people who want to kiss

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  Review by David Sims ★★★★★ 6

  the world is ending

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★★ 18

  Recording as repression.

  The objective subjective, memory becoming measurable as a transferable possession to experience universally and a purchasable product to live vicariously. But the most dangerous is in re-living one's memory as it is not simply perfect recollection, which exists in our world, but perfect simulation, which our world is approaching. What reason is there in living in the harshness of reality when the warm embrace of selective nostalgia can be re-played over, and over, and over, and over, one's future subsumed in the past that becomes the present, forever. An unreality just as good as the real thing, in exchange for the non-role of the real thing. However, what differentiates this state from that of nostalgia is that…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 1

  Kathryn Bigelow 1995 cyberpunk state of the nation address. It remains by far her most ambitious movie, putting on the blender so many at the moment anxities (the Rodney King tape, the approaching millenium, gangsta rap, virtual reality and the way then arriving social media changes how relationships and images are experienced) and making them ready to be carnivalized through some inspired forceful filmmaking. It does for the first half of the 90s what Kelly's Southland Tales, another strangely hopeful California set dystopic science fiction, does for the early 00s (not surprisingly both were widely derided at the time). This is far from a perfect film, James Cameron and Jay Cocks script not only has some really awful oneliners but…