Reviews

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  ★★★½ review by laird on Letterboxd

  If you rearrange the letters in "Godard" you can spell "rad dog."

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  ★★★★ review by matt lynch on Letterboxd

  "You know, a town with money's a little like a mule with a spinning wheel. Nobody knows how he got it and danged if he knows how to use it!" -- Lyle Lanley

  I simply don't feel I have the cultural capital to even begin to really decode this, but I think it's suggesting that words and pictures may no longer be sufficient to make sense of the world around us, that things have mutated so much that we're sort of like a dog trying to interpret humans. We need to learn new tricks. Could be pulling that out of my ass, though.

  In any case I was frequently and literally stunned by this, disoriented moment to moment, and it was exhilarating.

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  ★★★★½ review by Michael Strenski on Letterboxd

  Cat videos are for hacks. Dog videos are for auteurs.

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  ★★★★ review by davidehrlich on Letterboxd

  “soon, people will need interpreters to understand the words coming out of their own mouths.”

  you can say that again.

  if ever stars were meaningless... easily the most fascinating and hostile use of 3D i've ever seen in a feature, puts image in direct conflict with meaning, encouraging viewers to see what we don't see. that often translates into watching a man fondling a naked woman's ass as he takes a massive liquid shit. in 3D.

  the split-image stuff makes for some of the most sublime moments i've had at the movies this year – as your eyes cross and then individually close, you can practically feel the synapses latching onto each other in your brain.

  can't claim to have a handle on all of it, or that i would appreciate the film any more if i did, but it's as immediately affecting as any of Godard's late works, and it's mandatory viewing (IN THEATERS) for all. leave it to the analog masters to expose the potential (and the problems) of digital imagery.

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  ★★★★½ review by Peter Labuza on Letterboxd

  Preliminary scattered thoughts at The Film Stage (written literally only 2 hours after its Cannes premiere). Theoretically, this is the miracle that answers the dilemma of Historie(s) Du Cinema: Cinema as document vs. Cinema as art. Arnheim's Total Cinema and Bazin's Total Realism have long stood opposite for each other. Through the use of 3D flip cams, Godard proposes that a Total Cinema is simply a Total Realism. In essence, this is a film that introduces us to the image without language or metaphor. It is instead the image of pure reality, and thus pure freedom.

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