90% Holy Motors

All Critics (92) | Top Critics (22) | Fresh (82) | Rotten (9)

As cryptic and unpredictable as that premise might suggest.

Lavant is splendid in the film, and he's essentially the entire film - and yet, "Holy Motors" is somewhat more than a contraption built for a fearless performer.

Here is a film that is exasperating, frustrating, anarchic and in a constant state of renewal. It's not tame.

I don't know what Lavant is playing here because I've never seen anything like it.

Leos Carax's surreal ode to ... identity? Movies? Performance? Identity and performance in movies, or movies and performance in identity, or some other combination that will come to mind upon further viewings?

[A] crazy-beautiful reverie about movies, love, the love of movies, and the inevitability of human melancholy by the perpetually mysterious French filmmaker L?os Carax.

An exercise in overindulgence.

A glorious, gross, absurd, haunting dream and deconstruction of identity that may enthrall like a symphony or annoy like a rash.

Whatever your approach to the schoizoid storyline, you're unlikely to ever forget the exhilarating, eruptive cinematic splooge of Holy Motors.

Holy moly, Carax drops the movie acid.

...Viewers are along for a ride, wild and surreal.

The most brilliant and exhilarating film of the year.

The audience member never wonders what is happening, though we may often wonder why, or under what laws this reality operates.

Weirdly - and probably for entirely the wrong reasons - I couldn't take my eyes off it.

Carax's film is a cousin to "Synecdoche" and a modern response to Rivette's "Celine and Julie Go Boating." He even appears to have anticipated Cronenberg's "Cosmopolis," answering the questions set forth...as to where all the limos go at night.

Denis Lavant gives a tour de force performance(s) showing both great acting skill and amazing physical virtuosity - the motion capture scene is jaw dropping to watch.

You'll either run with it or you won't, but you can be sure you've never seen anything quite like it.

While a single viewing (or even three) of Holy Motors isn't enough to begin to plumb the depths of its mysteries, it is enough to confirm that this weird, dazzling, utterly unique movie is one of the highlights of 21st century cinema thus far.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/holy_motors/

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