The film is at its best, though, when it is trying to connect Mikey to any larger American ailment or masculinity but simply allows Mikey to be his mercenary conman self...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2024

Baker’s movies have always been about location, location, location, and Red Rocket is no different.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 13, 2022

It is Rexs extraordinary puppy-dog vigour that makes the character tolerable in spite of his repeated appalling decisions.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 11, 2022

As well as being filthy, droll and almost unbearably tense, it offers great news for anyone too broke to go to drama school.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 11, 2022

A dirty delight. Weird, smart, fantastic and very, very wrong.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 11, 2022

Rex actively underplays Mikey’s self-interest and cruelty, so that -- in a way -- the audience becomes an equal target of his manipulation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 10, 2022

Rex, who has a colourful background of his own, is charismatic enough to leave no doubt about Mikey’s powers of persuasion. The question is whether audiences will tolerate the company of someone who starts out bad and gets worse.

| Mar 10, 2022

Baker delivers a truly outstanding piece of Americana in this deliriously sexy, silly and genuinely thrilling metaphor for the Trump era.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 10, 2022

A kinetic, funny film that owes it all to the snake it makes you wish you had never set eyes on.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 10, 2022

A beguiling and beautiful film about a total toerag, Red Rocket is a unique character study: Mikey Saber will charm your socks off, and you’ll hate him for it.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 8, 2022

The backdrop of this film is, not by accident, Trump's election in 2016... There's a lot of Warren Beatty's Shampoo character in Mikey. That film, of course, set against Nixon's election.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2022

It’s about the American underclass, ignored, bitter, desperate and, when the opportunity arises, full of fight.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 19, 2022

The film's ambivalence is its strength -- leaving us room to be seduced by its deluded anti-hero, and to share his entrancement with his sleazy American dream.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 6, 2022

I miss quieter movies with their slow-build character studies. Watching director Sean Baker's Red Rocket, a portrait of fictional aging porn actor Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), was a reminder of how great those can be.

| Jan 6, 2022

[Director Sean Baker] has a real feel for the underside of life that's not compromising or demeaning.

| Dec 24, 2021

I think we're at the point where we can say there is such a thing as a "Sean Baker Film."

| Dec 24, 2021

"Red Rocket" isn't like any other movie you've seen this year. Expect the taste of pink sparkle doughnuts to linger.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 23, 2021

Rex is simply magnetic as Mikey, a character he brings to life through hisrat-a-tat patter, his jittery mannerisms and theself-serving interactions he has with others.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 23, 2021

A movie that is outrageously fun, savagely smart, brightly satirical, and ultimately haunting.

| Dec 21, 2021

Baker can't seem to decide whether he wants us to laugh at, to pity or to understand his subjects.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 21, 2021