Popular reviews

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★½ 13

  This is the kind of movie where when someone gets shot, their head explodes, the blood is super bright red, and Wang Chung is playing. Masterpiece.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½

  i basically snorted this movie off my television. Robby Müller forever.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 3

  William Friedkin’s thematic extension/reversal of The French Connection with gritty 70s semi documentary given to 80s synthetic artifice (all warm colors, decadent behavior, modernist architecture). This would be a gem for Robby Mueller great cinematography alone. It is pure pulp, a dance of seduction and death between cinema’s toughest mannequin (William Petersen) and an ambiguous capitalist zombie (Willem Dafoe). A tale of bad crooks and even worse cops that plays against the usual hyper competence of the genre with a comic series of blunders and failure (I don’t think Petersen does a single thing that actually helps him catch Defoe the whole movie). It starts around Christmas but the only thing shared here is brutality and obsession. It is one…

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  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 1

  ACAB canon. one of the only totally rotten, cynical, mean-spirited movies i adore, so beautiful and so disgusting. knowing william petersen is a chill gentleman in real life makes his full body son of a bitch performance even more breathtaking. i've decided it's feminist because the women are cool and smart and the men are nude psychopaths

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★½ 14

  The spiritual LA sequel to The French Connection in which Friedkin finds in Bill Peterson's Richard Chance a cop somehow more loathsome and terrible at his job than 'Popeye' Doyle, and a criminal, in Dafoe's master counterfeiter Rick Masters, even smoother and cooler than Alain "Frog One" Charnier. And he also throws in an even more insane and nerve-racking car chase.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 7

  Friedkin had a unique skill for finding Hell-on-Earth horror in just about any setting or genre, and doing so in this equally sleek and scorching piece of 80s neo-noir art-pulp transcendence—which takes an authentically researched counterfeit-printing crime procedural and stylistically pushes it to the surreal sensory overload of its unhinged, thrill-junkie hotshot cop protagonist—is still among his finest achievements. There's a lot in here to love but one of my favorite details is that brief flash cut back to the bridge bungee jumping in the middle of the astonishingly, recklessly tangible guerilla car chase through the LA river and reverse-traffic freeway. It’s the moment that confirms that through all this loud, clockwork chaos he has unleashed (in part by being…

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  Review by Wesley R. Ball ★★★★★ 3

  Purely quintessential 80's cinema- a blood laced, coke-induced thrill ride set to the timeless backdrop of a neon sunset and the eternally melodic bars of Wang Chung.

  Possibly William Friedkin's masterpiece.

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 6

  Well that's one way to end a film.

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★★ 2

  Just the most lurid shit ever, like an episode of Dragnet snorted an enormous pile of coke and chased it with some pills. William Petersen’s secret service agent looks and acts far sleazier than the “criminals” he’s after, who are mostly cautious and fastidious (if also violent sociopaths).

  The car chase is famous, of course, and rightfully so. But it’s more than an expertly shot action scene; it underscores and explicates character at the same time. Sure, going the wrong way on an L.A. freeway is a great setup for vehicular chaos. But the way Friedkin builds to that moment is very deliberate and totally brilliant. Petersen’s character doesn’t just accidentally wind up going the wrong way on a one-way…

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  Review by Alex Engquist ★★★★ 2

  Friedkin car chases > other car chases, because in a Friedkin film everyone's already careening wildly toward death; cars let them do it even faster.

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★

  cautionary tale for swaggy guys everywhere

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 6

  aesthetically invigorating, formally incomparable to any of its contemporaries, paced immaculately with no moments of fat or sluggishness. fronted by two incredible leading performances, one a sweaty psychotic william petersen whose dilated pupils and intensity inflect every inch of the frames he's in, his reaction to finding his partner's body is one of the greatest 20 second performances in film history, and on the other end a flamboyant merciless queer coded willem dafoe who was always just the greatest performer, one of those rare antagonists who is genuinely unpredictable, not necessarily in what he does but in how he executes them, and his posturing and wide eyed grin leaves you feeling rot underneath your skin. the whole movie is essentially…