The Congress is part live action and part Ralph Bakshi fever dream, but all nightmare. It paints a vision of the future where individuality and anything resembling free will is supplanted by delicious chemical cocktails and a candy-coated reversal.

| Sep 24, 2019

The weighty ideas are welcome, but Folman dumps them on us in bucketfuls of alphabet soup.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 3, 2014

The anger drains out of the picture, and we watch in a state of passive appreciation and indifference.

| Sep 5, 2014

An acquired taste, this dense Jabberwocky-ish word salad is a political allegory about a populace that's been pharmaceutically duped into believing its wretched world is wonderful.

| Sep 4, 2014

A half-live-action, half-animated headtrip that throws Robin Wright into a dizzying showbiz paradigm shift.

| Sep 4, 2014

A dystopian blend of live-action and animation that acidly comments on some of Hollywood's touchiest issues before drifting off into an existential fog.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 3, 2014

It's almost painful to watch the immense promise of "The Congress," Ari Folman's spectacularly ambitious experiment, dissipate into nothing.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 3, 2014

It's like Folman took several different genres-Hollywood satire, speculative dystopian fiction, family melodrama-and fused them into something amorphous and nebulous.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 2, 2014

"The Congress" is a roll call of the orgiastic pleasures and bountiful comforts that art provides, and, a reminder of what waits for us when we leave the theater.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 29, 2014

There's something to be said for a movie that manages to baffle and dazzle in equal measure. If Daffy Duck had taken up political and media theory, his brain might look like this.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 29, 2014

Ambitiously trippy and compulsively watchable ...

| Aug 28, 2014

"The Congress" becomes as frustrating and expensive-looking as "Cloud Atlas." Try to follow it and you may feel abandoned in a maze.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 28, 2014

The Congress will thrill some but proves more often to be frustrating and lacking in emotion, especially when it comes to Wright. Even a sex scene feels devoid of passion.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 28, 2014

While always detailed in its visual execution, each new aspect of the film's world remains conceptually hollow, growing ultimately into a Matrix-style allegory for the nature of truth ...

| Aug 28, 2014

It spirals into logy animated nonsense.

| Original Score: C | Aug 28, 2014

Long on vision but short on coherence, this live-action/animation dyad boasts a stranger kind of duality: As it unspooled, I felt I'd never seen anything quite like it before... and already I was fantasizing about a tighter, less self-serious remake.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 28, 2014

Busting with ideas, from ageism in Hollywood to the soullessness of digital life.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 28, 2014

Like its actress, it's an ambitious knockout that doesn't quite live up to its potential

| Original Score: B- | Aug 28, 2014

It's a folly of the first order, but one that many people will nonetheless want to see, if only because it's so out there.

| Original Score: C | Aug 28, 2014

Jettisoning a connection to anything concrete, Folman, who started his career in documentaries, loses his narrative moorings.

| Aug 26, 2014