Exhilarating, opaque, heartbreaking and completely bonkers – French auteur Leos Carax's so-called comeback film, Holy Motors, is a deliciously preposterous piece of filmmaking that appraises life and death and everything in between, reflected in a funhouse mirror.
Holy Motors
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Germany · 2012
1h 55m
Director Leos Carax
Starring Denis Lavant, Eva Mendes, Kylie Minogue, Michel Piccoli
Genre Drama, Fantasy
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We follow 24 hours in the life of an actor who moves from role to role. As each character, the actor possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old. But who is his audience exactly?
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein
Holy Motors is typically confounding but on every level that matters a work of unfettered - and liberating - imagination.
Léos Carax's maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile.
A surreal head-scratcher that'd make Luis Buñuel smile, it may not be perfectly formed, but there's no denying its fierce originality.
Holy Motors is aggressively "wild," a puzzle that tweaks the mind but doesn't nourish.
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
It's a gift for moviegoers to have this much freedom, and exhilarating. In Holy Motors you never know where Mr. Carax will take you and you never know what, exactly, you're to do once you're there.
Village Voice by Melissa Anderson
Unclassifiable, expansive, and breathtaking.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling.
Audaciously giving itself license to do whatever it wants, Leos Carax's narratively unhinged, beautifully shot and frequently hilarious Holy Motors coheres -- arguably, anyway -- into a vivid jaunt through the auteur's cinematic obsessions.
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