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Nocturama

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

France, Germany, Belgium · 2016
2h 10m
Director Bertrand Bonello
Starring Finnegan Oldfield, Vincent Rottiers, Hamza Meziani, Manal Issa
Genre Drama, Thriller

In Paris, a motley group of young people engineer a deadly plan to spread shock and awe in the city. Each has their own role to play to destroy the society they're tired of living in. To wait for their plan to come to fruition, they tensely hole up in a department store, a symbol of the consumerist society they're attacking.

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What are critics saying?

90

Variety by

Bonello replies to the news with a magnetic and purely cinematic gesture.

20

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

Without a real-world correlative for the actions it depicts, Bertrand Bonello’s new film would merely be tedious and pretentious rather than repellent.

67

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

It’s fine that Bonello would rather raise unsettling questions than provide unhelpful answers, but his inquiry often feels every bit as confused as his characters. Nocturama is enthralling until the bitter end, but it’s so hard to distill its purpose that you can’t tell if the film is opaque or if it simply offers nothing to see.

60

The Guardian by Jordan Hoffman

By keeping its characters at such a far remove, the film doesn’t condemn them nor cheer them on. At least, not on paper. In actuality, with all the crafty editing moves, slick music cues and stylish production design, Nocturama does the one thing it shouldn’t: it makes domestic terrorism look cool.

70

The Hollywood Reporter by Jordan Mintzer

As a portrait of French youth ridden by angst and anger toward the powers that be...Nocturama makes an intriguingly cinematic case for showing over telling. But as a depiction of how, and why, terrorists (or anarchists or whatever they are) can take down a city, it falls apart in the face of what happens in the real world.

90

Screen International by Lisa Nesselson

The protagonists are pathetic yet see themselves as bold and daring and in this Bonello has captured something about the present moment that rings absolutely true.

91

The Film Stage by Nick Newman

As much as I admire Nocturama (answer: an awful lot), locating exact points of admiration proves difficult when its pleasures are so purposefully alienating and bitter.

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