Episode 50: Heart of Glass / Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives / Sunset

| Original Score: 82/100 | Oct 18, 2021

It's claustrophobic and puzzling, it's challenging, intellectually and emotionally and Nemes' rebellion feels dangerously authentic. Pay attention.

| Dec 2, 2020

Nemes and Royer create an over-encumbered plot that shifts the focus in so many directions that it leaves the viewer essentially cross-eyed.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 2, 2020

What's intriguing about Sunset is its setting and specific time period.

| Dec 2, 2020

Sunset is so messy, long and confusing that you can't help wonder if Nemes is just a one-trick pony.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 2, 2020

"Sunset" has an impressive sense of place, and while it is about the past, it is easy to suspect its tone is more than apt for today, as uncertainty again reigns.

| Dec 2, 2020

Stripped of life-and-death consequences, Sunset never convinces us that its protagonist can sustain such unrelenting scrutiny.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 2, 2020

It's an interesting, idiosyncratic film, yet also an aloof and unsatisfying one. Oh well: Nemes is hardly the first talent to hit a sophomore slump.

| Dec 2, 2020

A thought-provoking exploration of agency, set against a seemingly mundane early 20th Century backdrop that is given an almost gothic atmosphere.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 28, 2020

A fevered chaos of confusion and unease.

| Jul 30, 2020

The second film by the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, moves me with its visual style, evokes an impeccable classicism in each scene with the claustrophobic camera handling and the historical context in which it takes place. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 29, 2020

Sadly... the filmmakers have created what amounts to a dramatic still life, a plodding drama that is at times unintentionally funny.

| May 29, 2020

Instead, this feels like an abstract ode to the frantic, listless, tightly wound thing a city becomes on the eve of its demise.

| Mar 25, 2020

Nemes has crafted a serpentine film that oscillates between the unknown and the intimate, making for two and a half hours that are as arduous as they are involving.

| Jan 17, 2020

It's doubtful that any actress has had this many close-up shots since Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc. But [Juli Jakab] makes the most of them, creating a deeply admirable heroine.

| Jan 7, 2020

Sunset is one of the most innovative and invigorating films I've seen, and I can't imagine that anything else this year could have topped it.

| Dec 30, 2019

While Sunset may not be as viscerally difficult as Son of Saul, Nemes's evocation of 1913 Budapest is still beset by an overwhelming sense of violence and dread, with its dark, phantasmagoric images suggesting a civilization on the brink of conflagration.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 11, 2019

It's a heady and spectacular production, but - like many dreams - it doesn't seem worth interpreting.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 3, 2019

It's all too vague to function effectively as either a commentary on the build-up to the Great War or as the story of a woman looking to find her place in a city predicated on rigid, gender-determined hierarchies.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 1, 2019

The events depicted will enthral those eager to fathom the narrative's multifarious mysteries, while driving others to baffled distraction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2019