High-Rise may not be the greatest Ballard adaptation ever made, but it doesn't have to be: it stands on its own as a masterclass of the substance of style, and how stories told long ago can have often eerie, direct parallels in the future.

| Aug 25, 2018

High-Rise is just about the looniest garbage I have seen in a long while.

| Original Score: F | Mar 21, 2017

In High-Rise the fitfully brilliant Briton Ben Wheatley, with writing partner Amy Jump, seizes what seems a perfect-fitting text -- JG Ballard's dystopian novel High-Rise -- and makes an omnishambles of it.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 28, 2016

It's a very British subject, this obsession with class differences and class warfare, but Wheatley's compelling handling of the material -- though criticised in some quarters for its deliberately alienating elements -- seems on the mark.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2016

Collet-Serra seems as transfixed by the landscape as he is by Lively's presence, suggesting a continuity between humanity and the natural world.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 17, 2016

It's meant to leave a bad taste and it does. High-Rise is an effective adaptation of a classic dystopian novel that no longer seems like science fiction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2016

It's also a touch overlong and indulgent in the back half... But it is bold filmmaking, taking on a source material as difficult as Ballard's novel, and makes a decent go of building this ghoulish world so close to our own.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 15, 2016

High-Rise switches genres effortlessly - black humour one moment, dystopic parable the next - until it becomes its own singular, horrifying, immensely captivating thing.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 20, 2016

No matter how much one shades the characters, though, High-Rise defies adaptation because the most vivid character is the building itself.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 18, 2016

There is a goldmine of rich material here, all beautifully shot, but fatally lacking in focus or momentum.

| May 18, 2016

It could take decades for critics and audiences to appreciate whatever genius lurks behind the chaos, but for the time being, it seems like little more than madness.

| May 18, 2016

Director Ben Wheatley ("Kill List") is masterful with arresting imagery set in a dystopian spin on the '70s; less so with a compelling narrative.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 13, 2016

I soon found myself wanting to wash off the modernist stench of Wheatley's world. And yet it's entrancing all the same, so much so that like Laing and his fellows, I had no desire to leave the high-rise.

| May 13, 2016

High-Rise doesn't shock at all. And if its message about elitism, isolation, the decadence of capitalism, and the phony pursuits of the bourgeoisie still rings true - well, sure, what else is new?

| May 13, 2016

Just realistic enough to be harrowing, just fantastical enough to be fascinating, just nasty enough to have you looking for the building's emergency exit now and then.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 12, 2016

Onscreen, "High-Rise" is curiously inert. The themes don't resonate, and the story lags and lumbers.

| May 12, 2016

High-Rise is a deeply and relentlessly unpleasant experience, and a borderline incoherent one at that.

| May 12, 2016

High-Rise keeps hammering home the same points, and not even the wealth of strong performances from Hiddleston, Miller and Irons are enough to salvage the day.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 12, 2016

Wheatley renders this breakdown of civilization in jaunty montages of assaults, orgies, murders, and mounds of garbage, images backed by music ranging from Portishead to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2016

There are certain movies that you really want to like based on their ambition, or their weirdness, or their ambitious weirdness, and ultimately you just can't. Ben Wheatley's High-Rise is one of those movies.

| Original Score: C+ | May 12, 2016