Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Distills genre tropes (and their consequent pleasures) to their lean, potent essence.

| Original Score: A- | Nov 30, 2008

The main thing interesting about Boarding Gate is the spectacle of Assayas' effort -- the attitude and the international backdrop -- not the story itself.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 11, 2008

Like just about everything in Boarding Gate, the finale suggests that its creators have been watching too many other movies with similar premises and payoffs.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 28, 2008

The plot may be murky, but actress Asia Argento is a clear and commanding force throughout.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 28, 2008

This hypnotic, angular thriller about sex, murder, betrayal and money takes you on a feverish journey from nowhere to somewhere.

Full Review | Mar 21, 2008

A ridiculous poseur thriller that seems to be made up of the slow moments from Hong Kong action films and Euro-flashy stuff like Run Lola Run.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 21, 2008

Even an ultra-feral performance by Asia Argento -- the art house Angelina Jolie -- isn't enough to suffer through Boarding Gate, a draggy and incoherent thriller by French director Oliver Assayas.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 21, 2008

Boarding Gate plays with various genre codes and conventions very differently than most run-of-the-mill modern thrillers.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 20, 2008

Boarding Gate's surfaces are often so staggeringly beautiful that its superficiality becomes forgivable, with the pleasant distractions of Assayas' multi-layered frames, Argento's sinewy allure, and snippets of Brian Eno ambience on the soundtrack.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Mar 20, 2008

The picture grows on you, as does its laconic leading lady, whose slurry delivery conceals an ever-alert mouse handily equipped to beat the cat at his own game.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 20, 2008

Boarding Gate, B-movie heir to Phil Karlson and Ingmar Bergman, screws any pretence of naturalism for hallucinatory confrontations.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 19, 2008

This one is just murk.

| Original Score: D+ | Mar 19, 2008

If this is the effect Mr. Assayas wanted to achieve, he has succeeded admirably.

Full Review | Mar 19, 2008

There's basically only one reason to see Olivier Assayas's self-consciously hypermodern, meta-sleazy, English-French-Chinese-language globo-thriller Boarding Gate, and her name is Asia Argento.

Full Review | Mar 18, 2008

[Director Assayas] may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, yet he's caught somewhere between insight and exploitation.

| Mar 17, 2008

[Director] Assayas is out of his element here, and the encounters have no snap: It's like one of those two-character plays in which the frequent pauses are filled with the audience's coughing spasms.

| Mar 17, 2008

[Boarding Gate] rocked me pretty hard.

| Feb 29, 2008

Thrills and drama are left standing on the tarmac in Boarding Gate, a limp, sleazy inanity.

| May 25, 2007

Chock full of elements that never spark beyond one-sheet dimension.

Full Review | May 19, 2007