Cronenberg’s indictment of celebrity worship might be delivered with all the grace and stealth of a chainsaw cutting through tin cans, but it’s difficult not to agree that as a culture we’re doubtless heading somewhere similarly dire and disgusting.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 21, 2025

Cronenberg doesn't know what to do with the material about celebrity culture and pharmaceutical conspiracies, leaving everything on a sanitized, leaden surface that slowly drains away like blood drained from an injection. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 16, 2025

[Brandon Croneberg's] approach is appropriately intimate and sensuous, physical yet disconnected, and his mix of visual restraint, visual elegance, and conceptual complexity make him someone to watch for.

| Feb 3, 2024

Cronenberg drills down on the main points, our obsession with celebrity, with the dull force of a minor headache.

| Aug 18, 2022

The meal, while beautifully laid out with care, is a little thin - even at such a deliberate pace, slow slower slowest, it needs a little more meat for caressing

| Jul 2, 2021

The cinematic equivalent of a museum piece - amazing to look at and exquisitely polished, but ultimately untouchable and completely unrelatable.

| Aug 2, 2019

Antiviral's narrative, which is more essay than drama, lacks the subversive glimmers of warmth and wit that make David's films so deliciously palatable, no matter how dire they get.

| Jul 31, 2019

... a beautifully done cautionary tale bathed in horror. Be prepared for lots of poking, prodding, needles, and bizarrely disgusting human tissue creations.

| Mar 3, 2019

In Landry Jones, Cronenberg has found the ideal "unconventional" lead star for such a twisted future vision, as reprehensible and reptilian as the world around him, but with that faint glimmer of requisite humanity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 9, 2019

As a writer and director, Brandon utilises the familiar themes and aesthetics with ambition and assurance, making body horror his own grotesque but galvanising cinematic playground.

| Dec 4, 2018

The creepy creativity does not fall far from the twisted tree in the filmmaking realm of writer-director Brandon Cronenberg...his impishly venomous vehicle percolates in the macabre mannerisms of his proud papa [David}...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 17, 2018

This is a movie that's packed with sexy metaphors. But it's missing the emotional connective tissue required to hold them all together.

| May 25, 2018

Antiviral is a none-too-subtle comment on tabloid-generated fandom. But it's undeniably intriguing and loaded with Cronenbergian atmosphere.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 1, 2017

It's a work that feels technically precise but trying just a little too hard

| Aug 11, 2017

I respect ANTIVIRAL, but I can't say I liked it. But then again, I'm not sure it wants to be liked. In fact, I believe it's trying very hard to make you not like it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 23, 2017

A tough, almost willfully difficult movie, but it's fascinating more often than it is dramatically off-putting.

| Aug 24, 2015

"Antiviral" is what happens when you make a movie around a fleetingly interesting idea but forget to find a story in it.

| Original Score: D | Jul 15, 2015

...a ridiculous and flat-out dumb premise that's employed to terminally underwhelming effect by Cronenberg...

| Original Score: 0/4 | Jul 16, 2014

With an obsession for close-ups of needles piercing skin, Antiviral leaves one with a OCD-style desire to wash ones hands... the overreaching success of the film lies in its believable depiction of a culture slowly rotting at the core.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 25, 2013

The script is thin but effectively creepy as it examines contemporary pop culture obsessions while maximizing the queasy close-ups of needles, blood and medical procedures.

| Jun 12, 2013