The movie wears out its welcome long before it meanders to a close at 121 minutes. But as a kinky costume party it's watchable, if only for the smutty sex scenes and Biller's bold pop-art decor.

| Mar 30, 2016

Reported parallels with the Marquis de Sade's Justine just don't wash. It's more like Russ Meyer, except the jugs on view aren't as big.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 16, 2009

The plywood acting's pretty funny, as is the coy sex; what amazes is the beautifully lurid, near-fetishistic set design. At two hours, it's an in-joke over-indulged, and it's so camp the camera's practically winking, but minor cultdom beckons.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 15, 2009

At an epic two hours the stilted dialogue and eye-scorchingly oversaturated film stock threaten to test the patience. But as a self-conscious exercise in kitsch graverobbing, 'Viva' succeeds.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 15, 2009

It's the sort of attention to detail that would be admirable in a short film. But in a film that plays out at two hours it's unendurable. Paying ironic homage to bad cinema doesn't suddenly make it good.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 15, 2009

Where her film lets itself down, though, is it's simply not funny; you assume that a certain kind of hipster audience may be tickled by all this, but the laughs will be as forced as those that bray out of the screen at all too regular intervals.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 15, 2009

The acting is as subtly, drolly bad as it needs to be. The hairpieces and cheesy background muzak compete for the honour of perfect finishing touch. At two hours Viva is a mite too long. But summer is here: give genius its leash.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 15, 2009

Anna Biller's pastiche of '70s sexploitation flicks finds its G-spot somewhere in the space between past misogyny and present feminism. It's a transgressive joy - if somewhat overlong.

Full Review | May 15, 2009

You can't create camp on purpose.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 18, 2008

The movie isn't comfortable or wholly successful.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 18, 2008

Beneath all the hippies and hair, makeup and music lies a film bubbling with ridiculous humor and serious heart.

| Jun 20, 2008

With its copious nudity and zipless hedonism, Viva, though unduly long, is a crafty reminder of a time when the X rating was flaunted, not feared.

| Jun 20, 2008

It takes skill -- a certain sly, even perverse nimbleness of craft -- to make an homage to schlock movies that treats them as works of art. Viva, written and directed by its star, Anna Biller, could just about be the third featurette in Grindhouse.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | May 19, 2008

The movie pops with parodic joy--in the hoary double-entendres and presentational acting styles--and hotly lighted 35-millimeter cinematography that evokes lounge music album covers and Playboy ads.

| May 8, 2008

Viva the film is as sly and knowing as Viva the character is endearingly oblivious.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 8, 2008

The campy early '70s is the goofy gift that keeps on giving in Viva, a mock soft-core sexploitation film that gets a lot right but forgets that less is often more, especially in plaid.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 2, 2008

A startlingly pitch-perfect reproduction of the kind of gauzy sex movies from the 1960s and early 1970s that preceded the hard-core revolution.

| May 2, 2008

Biller's film is to the films of Radley Metzger and Russ Meyer what Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven was to Douglas Sirk, only perhaps a little bit cannier and a lot less dryly academic about its postmodern tweaks.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 1, 2008

Anna Biller's debut feature Viva consciously combines elements of all of the above, offering a painstaking recreation of the look and feel of campy retro sexploitation.

| Original Score: B+ | May 1, 2008

Anna Biller's pseudofeminist send-up of the sexploitation movies of the late '60s and early '70s remains as limp as the flaccid dongs at her film's nudist sing-along.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 30, 2008