The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
Each narrative fissure further thwarts meaning. The most you can ask from a movie as nullifying as this one is that it offer wit and visual panache, which it does.
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Belgium, United States · 2014
1h 35m
Director Quentin Dupieux
Starring Alain Chabat, Jonathan Lambert, Élodie Bouchez, Kyla Kenedy
Genre Comedy
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In this surreal French comedy, told as a series of mysteriously inter-connected dream sequences, an aspiring director is given 48 hours by a producer to record an Oscar-worthy groan of pain. If he succeeds, the producer will back his film.
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
Each narrative fissure further thwarts meaning. The most you can ask from a movie as nullifying as this one is that it offer wit and visual panache, which it does.
Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
A viewer can’t help but take it as an artistic statement, even though nothing — not even the nods to Mulholland Dr. — suggests that Dupieux’s motivated by anything more than a hankering to make something weird and funny. He succeeds on the first part, and fitfully accomplishes the second.
Too transitory and too undemanding to be termed a mindfuck, for Reality minditch seems about right, and it's one you even occasionally get the pleasure of scratching.
Los Angeles Times by Michael Rechtshaffen
The bizarro plot threads, and dippy characters fail to connect in any rewarding way, resulting in a largely unfunny film that proves as repetitive and tedious as the 1971 Philip Glass snippet that provides its entire score.
The accumulation of weird incidents and fake-outs doesn’t lead anywhere productive. That’s the problem with Dupieux’s vacant brand of surrealism: If you just keep pulling out the rug, there will never be anything to stand on.
RogerEbert.com by Simon Abrams
The film will only work for you if you expect it not to make sense, and enjoy jokes that go on and on and then suddenly (and repeatedly) jack-knife off a cliff or two.
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