Reviews

• 

  ★★★★★ review by Josiah Morgan on Letterboxd

  The greatest film of the decade so far. A heightened state of awareness and consciousness: Franco's aural design comes at us from all angles, too many sounds piling on top of each other... The Sound And The Fury is an entirely linear narrative that Franco abstracts until it is no longer a story of character and time but a story of texture - the feel of wood, and of soft grass, and of slipping away into sleep after waking in the early hours of the morning, and of your family gradually forgetting you, and of a culture you cannot and never will understand, and the smell of your own sweat, and the smell of the air before an earthquake, and the sound of everybody around you screaming your histories without empathy for your experiences, and the feel of displacement within your own body, and a fear of others, and most of all a fear of yourself, and the overwhelming taste of rusty metal in your mouth.

• 

  ★★★★★ review by Josiah Morgan on Letterboxd

  One long, slow fade into irrelevance, stepping into the mind of another and another and another and another then it stops. Franco's performance is the one I am most drawn to at this point in my life, a complete encapsulation of everything that makes humans.... human. Time is all our perception allows. Time itself is your misfortune.

• 

  ★★★★★ review by Josiah Morgan on Letterboxd

  bring my brother back

• 

  ★★★★ review by daniel on Letterboxd

  This is very good, and even if it weren't, I'd still rather see Franco tackle the "unadaptable" than some hack prestige director. The only real problem for me was Quentin's segment; Franco omits the stream-of-consciousness sections that made the novel a favourite of mine. But some things are bound to get lost in the medium shift anyway, so it's hardly an unforgivable sin.

  Franco approaches the narrative in a fairly straightforward manner but does a great job at translating Faulkner's prose into images, particularly via uncomfortable close-up shots. Every moment that Benjy appeared onscreen could have been a disaster, but none of them were. In fact, some of my favourite moments featured Benjy (on the cart, in the church, opening the fence).

  I think the critics are entirely wrong about Franco here. Maybe it's because they see him as some pretentious loser who makes invisible art. But I don't get that image of Franco from The Sound and the Fury at all. If this film really is (as the critics say) Franco misfiring, I can't wait to see his successes.

• 

  ★★★★★ review by Anna Belle on Letterboxd

  James Franco is a great director, with real vision. I love his adaptations of Faulker and I love his acting in them (he picks the best characters to play - Benjy in this film and Darl in As I Lay Dying). He really knows what he's doing and I hope he keeps on this track of making really good movies. If he makes Spring Breakers 2 instead I will kill myself.

• See all reviews