RogerEbert.com by Brian Tallerico
Open Windows goes from crazy to Crazy to CRAZY, but maintains enough energy and cultural currency to keep the entertainment value high.
Spain, United States · 2014
Rated R · 1h 41m
Director Nacho Vigalondo
Starring Elijah Wood, Sasha Grey, Neil Maskell, Iván González
Genre Action, Crime, Thriller
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Nick's won an opportunity to go out with his favorite actress, Jill, but she flakes out on him. A mysterious hacker gifts Nick the opportunity to spy on Jill through the Internet, but both parties get more than they bargained for as the stakes rise to dangerous levels.
RogerEbert.com by Brian Tallerico
Open Windows goes from crazy to Crazy to CRAZY, but maintains enough energy and cultural currency to keep the entertainment value high.
Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.
The new thriller from Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes) is visually dazzling, but the story starts off silly and ends up a confusing, maddening mess.
The A.V. Club by David Ehrlich
Open Windows attempts to disguise a revenge movie by cloaking it in the flash of a voyeuristic techno-thriller, but the combined concepts are so high that the film resolves as Vigalondo reaches his Icarus moment, the corpse so mangled and unpleasant the project’s ambition can only be identified via dental records.
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
Smothered by a storm of visual tics — and the tiniest of nods to “Rear Window” (1954) — any social commentary takes second place to multitasking gimmickry.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
It's pretty silly stuff, leaving the film to rely on more conventional car chases, woman-in-peril scenarios and mistaken identity to keep things interesting -- all seen on that laptop via security cameras and the like.
A fiendishly inventive thriller built around an audacious if unsustainable gimmick, Open Windows elevates Hitchcockian suspense to jittery new levels of mayhem and paranoia.
Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov
Open Windows has plenty to say about both the death of privacy and the dominion of the always-connected digiverse we now inhabit, and editor Bernat Vilaplana does a remarkable job of keeping the film’s frenetic pace rushing headlong toward an ending that you’ll never see coming.
The Playlist by Nikola Grozdanovic
While the execution may be somewhat of a misfire, the obvious effort and thought put into making the concept work is worthy.
Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.
Vicky describes her youth and story of her changing life at the beginning of the new millennium.
In the 1930s, an artist and his models scandalized a nation with their controversial paintings.
She risked life and family to change the world.
To find the truth they must lose themselves.