The Neon Demon

After I watched this movie, I’ve got the feeling that Nicolas Winding Refn is drowning in his own filmmaking utopias. I get that the Neon Demon has a clear premise about modelling, but I don’t get the artistic pathos they’re using to get to the point. Sure, many of the scenes are very interesting and very pleasing to the eye, but as a whole, I feel like the movie’s just a concurrence of different scenes that don’t make much sense. The director’s lucky that he can choose the right music to his video. I fell for it with Drive, but it was a bit harder this time. (11/22/2016)

A non-mainstream, visually captivating, hypnotically immersive experience for those who can appreciate Nicolas Winding Refn's extraordinary visual sensibilities. But Refn is also explicitly provocative, completely unnecessarily so, and I could really do without a few scenes (sex in the morgue, yuck!). So when I add up the pros and cons, Refn ends up with a draw, but the kid has talent for more, much more. That's probably how Jaromil Jireš would shoot it when he was making Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, he would be a bit of a pervert and permanently on drugs. (10/05/2016)

Pubertal provocation. Refn was able to show the depth of the surface in such a way that a similar emptied mess full of dull script clichés could hardly upset a person. In addition, NRW directs poorly this time. Wooden dialogues, clip sequences that every little talented advertising director can handle, whilst the great Elle and Cliff Martinez's electro-arpeggio take care of all the dynamics. I was expecting hypnosis, but this is a sedative. [Cannes 2016] (05/20/2016)

It's as terribly empty, resigned, and exhausted as you would expect from the brief. Once again it's a photo-novel, once again everything there merely serves the purpose of setting the scene, only unlike the previous Only God Forgives, this one is still horribly unoriginal. A thousand well-worn allusions to the lifelessness of top modeling only generate pretty shots without context and such a desperately effort at controversy that I winced even when Jena Malone was getting it on with a corpse. Think! And it’s a pity, because I want to watch an android in makeup vomit up an eyeball. Because Refn should take a cue from Drive and work on planting his style in a genre world where both can blossom and enrich each other. As it is, he'll only get derisive giggles from the cinema during the stilted dialogue and unsuccessful, overwrought spiritualism. How aptly the film is described by a scene in which an artificial model, remade with thousands of operations, proudly boasts that her plastic surgeon calls her the "bionic woman", whereupon she receives the disgusted response "And that's supposed to be a compliment?" (09/23/2016)

Spoiled pretentiousness with two hours of running time and two twists. Cheaply provocative, grandly announcing something that will never come, and most importantly – completely unnecessary. The attempt to approach the incomprehensible spectacles of David Lynch is too shallow and self-absorbed. I understand that all the colors, wordless minutes, and repulsive scenes have metaphors that Nicolas Winding Refn enjoys talking about, but at their core, they are all so disgustingly trivial that they cannot even touch a clever or sophisticated effect. I was looking forward to more Danish-Hollywood hypnotism because I love Drive, and just narrowly missed Only God Forgives. But the main character's vacant stares don't work here because they have no narrative foundation to draw from, and the supporting monsters in this case are more like screenplay flaws. Nicolas just lost even the most patient of us. (09/25/2016)