Think of it as Sunset Bloodsport with Jean-Claude as Norma Desmond.

| Jun 10, 2013

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

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 14, 2010

It's fun as far as it goes, and for the most part quite well made, but in the end it's really not about very much at all.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 10, 2009

[Van Damme] brings a kind of weary dignity to the role, and a surprising self-awareness...

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 6, 2009

Seems like a spoof at first glance but this proves to be a compelling Post-modern thriller with gumption.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 30, 2009

A Godardian coup de cinéma.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 30, 2009

It's an amusingself-portrait which you want to indulge, but the film around it is so brash, manic and pleased with itself it may be difficult.

Full Review | Jan 30, 2009

Jean-Claude Van Damme, B-movie megastar gone straight-to-video, is back with a career-best performance in one of the coolest indie movies of the year.

Full Review | Jan 30, 2009

Witty in bits, noisy in others.

| Jan 30, 2009

Our chastened hero steers a confusing course between self-parody and self-justification. "Van Damme needs just one thing ..." runs the tag line, "... to be himself". But does anyone still care?

| Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 30, 2009

This may be the best movie he's made. It's in French, by the way.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 30, 2009

Van Damme is so good, and El Mechri's storytelling so entertaining, that JCVD takes its place alongside The Wrestler as one of the unlikeliest but most welcome comeback vehicles in ages.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 29, 2009

There's something seductively clever about the way French director and co-writer Mabrouk El Mechri has fractured chronology (à la Pulp Fiction) to examine JCVD's plight from various perspectives.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 21, 2008

It's hard to resist: Here's a battered superstar who has occupied so many fantasies, but in his fantasies he's just like us.

| Nov 21, 2008

JCVD has points of interest, but it may leave you feeling like you've just slowed down to look at a car wreck.

Full Review | Nov 21, 2008

A clever art-imitates-life-imitates-art send-up of celebrityhood and the state of the action-hero genre, JCVD juggles humor with whomping martial-arts moves and a kind of melancholy star turn from the melancholy, muscular star.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 20, 2008

Van Damme is an actor, pure and simple, and proves that he is just as deft and accomplished as the movies in which he appears.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 20, 2008

JCVD is what you might get if a French deconstructionist decided to make a drive-in flick: It reverse engineers the mayhem until it locates the humor, the sadness, and the insecure void at the heart of the genre.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 14, 2008

Put JCVD into the category of films that no one saw coming.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 14, 2008