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Southland Tales
Samuel Goldwyn Films


6.2

based on 26 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 43 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for language, violence, sexual material and some drug content

Starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mandy Moore, Justin Timberlake, Bai Ling, Cheri Oteri, and Miranda Richardson

The city stands on the brink of social, economic, and environmental disaster. Southland Tales is an epic story set over the course of three days that culminate in a massive 4th of July celebration. A large ensemble cast of characters includes Boxer Santaros, an action star stricken with amnesia; Krysta Now, an adult-film star developing her own reality-television project; and Roland Taverner, a Hermosa Beach police officer who holds the key to a vast conspiracy. (Samuel Goldwyn Films)

GENRE(S):	Comedy \| Drama \| Sci-fi
WRITTEN BY:	Richard Kelly
DIRECTED BY:	Richard Kelly
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: March 18, 2008 Theatrical: November 14, 2007
RUNNING TIME:	144 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	Germany / USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Funny, audacious, messy and feverishly inspired look at America and its discontents.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Delivers equal parts overwrought tedium and mind-bending beauty, spiked with brilliant throwaway images that more than make up for Kelly's heavy-handed hot-button pretensions.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it's such a passionate and ambitious mess -- overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots -- that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

In its willful, self-involved eccentricity, Southland Tales is really something else. Kelly's movie may not be entirely coherent, but that's because there's so much it wants to say.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Southland Tales has a mood unlike anything I've seen: dread that morphs into kitsch and then back again. It's a film that tried my patience, and one I couldn't shake off.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

To be clear: The odds are in favor of you hating it. I hated a lot of it when I saw a barely dry work-in-progress print, 163 minutes long, at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s 19 minutes shorter and better now, though “better” is relative when you’re dealing with a whatzahoozy such as this.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.

Empire Damon Wise

A bold and sometimes garbled take on modern American politics, this nevertheless marks an effective and surprisingly funny comeback for a film that many deemed to be DOA.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

Southland Tales pilfers large chunks of its plot and visual style from Alex Cox’s "Repo Man," Kathryn Bigelow’s "Strange Days" and Shane Carruth’s Sundance-winning "Primer," and unlike the makers of those films, Kelly hasn’t digested his influences and made them his own -- he’s more like the slacker college kid who’s just enough of an intellectual poseur to bluff his way to an A. That said, Southland Tales isn’t entirely without its pleasures, chiefly The Rock.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

You get the sense that Kelly is too angry to really find any of it funny. It's easy to empathize with his position, not so easy to remain engrossed in a film that's occasionally inspired but ultimately manic and scattered.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andy Spletzer

It's an ambitious film, but that doesn't mean it's good.

USA Today Claudia Puig

An ambitious hodgepodge that is all bang and bluster.

New York Magazine David Edelstein

Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Dizzyingly incoherent and subversively surreal, this sophomore effort from the man who made the great, strange "Donnie Darko" is certain to have its fans. I'm not going to be one of them.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

The further Kelly bends his funhouse mirror, the more he loses sight of what it was supposed to reflect. By the end, the image has twisted beyond coherence.

Film Threat Mark Bell

The film is just too much exposition, too long, too convoluted, too many characters and ultimately a huge disappointment.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

There's a lot of "stuff" here, and Kelly's biggest problem -- he's got more than a few -- is that he can't tell his good material from his bad.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Southland Tales does have enough energy and audacity to suggest significant potential. But was it ready for public consumption? The answer is no. It's as simple as that.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

You can't be both political and incoherent, and even though Kelly's models are "Kiss Me Deadly" and "Blade Runner," this vision of the near-future suggests a random blend of "Dr. No" and "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

The English term "shambolic" best describes a slow-paced, bloated and self-indulgent picture that combines science fiction, sophomoric humor and grisly violence soaked in a music-video sensibility.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Rarely has a picture been so self-consciously designed to be a culturally meaningful touchstone, and fallen so woefully short, as Southland Tales.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

May be ambitious in its genre-defying abandon, sideswiping science fiction, satire, film noir and melodrama along the way, but it's also exasperatingly convoluted, self-amused and politically sophomoric.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.

San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein

A mess, and that's really a shame.

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

It appears that Kelly spent the intervening years (since "Donnie Darko") taking hallucinogenic drugs, reading Philip K. Dick novels upside down, and – most disastrously – believing his own hype.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

If a more incoherent and self-indulgent movie has been released so far this century, I'm not aware of it.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.2 (out of 10) based on 43 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Seth C. gave it a0:
What happens when pop culture collapses in upon itself. A mess of a film that pretends to not be a mess by calling itself "surreal". I'm sorry Mr. Kelly, but to be surreal you'd need to know how to make a surreal film. Overwrought expositional dialogue kills this movie. Learn how to show rather than tell. That is the crux of surreal film-making 101 and a point that was missed by this filmmaker. There will be those who claim that the point of this film is to transcend genre definition and there will be those who call Kelly on his bullsh.t. I hope most people will be able to fall into the latter category.

C Whiteside gave it a1:
Honestly, this is perhaps the most disappointing movie I have ever seen.

Dathan L. gave it a9:
It's brilliant! As though Warhol and Jelinek had a child with AAD – if you take the film at face value, it’s complete crap. The intelligence is in the film’s criticism of itself and the culture it’s been released into. Many of the characters are badly played by former comedians and cheap pop icons specifically because they are type-casts designed to mock the roles they play. A specific instance: Justin Timberlake is a doped up and damaged narrator of the movie’s cultural situation; hilarious because as a famous pop-singer in real life, he’s a doped up and damaged narrator for America’s current cultural situation. There are many more, playing all the typical parts (Jesus and Death to start with). The Bible is a manuscript written by an action star and his porn-queen after he's been resurrected accidentally Easter-style! Wonderful stuff, though you will need a pretty good familiarity with American pop culture to catch all the mockery.

Andy P. gave it a10:
Unbelieveable good. A masterpiece.

Andreas S. gave it a10:
One of the best movies I have ever seen. A huge rollercoaster of happenings. A real masterpiece.

Chad S. gave it a7:
When an artist starts to believe his own press; the premature pronouncement by some overzealous fanboys(and a few critics) that the filmmaker is a genius(and yes, "Donnie Darko" was very accomplished for a first feature film), it's no wonder that the "genius" would attempt to match that initial success, and therefore overreach with a project as wildly ambitious as "Southland Tales". As some of you may know, "Donnie Darko" was released into theaters the same week that the towers fell, and predictably, it tanked at the box office(people were too busy watching CNN) before DVD gave it a second life. The filmmaker acknowledges the historical context behind the first running of "Donnie Darko" by providing "Southland Tales" with a post-9/11 backdrop. Texas gets nuked. "Southland Tales" is an alternative history of contemporary America. The sci-fi this time seems forced(like M. Night Shylaman, who feels pressured to come up with twist endings), an attempt to catch lightning in a bottle a second-time around, when a pared-down "Southland Tales" might've worked beautifully as a straight-up political satire about our lives during wartime. The neo-Marxist group resembles a twenty-first century version of the Weather Underground, or, because the group seems to be largely composed of females, "Southland Tales" might be making a reference to the militant feminist movement that's rendered in Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames"("Southland Tales" has the look of "Strange Days", and Katherine Bigelow was a "newspaper editor" in that cinematic manifesto of female empowerment), but with a difference: Cyndi Pinziki(Nora Dunn) is an adult-film director and Krysta Now(Sarah Michelle Gellar, a porn star; which acknowledges the fluid nature of feminist ideology. "Southland Tales" is very smart about how porn has infiltrated the mainstream. As for the sci-fi elements, the filmmaker's use of dopplegangers and California as a post-nuclear setting, calls forth to mind novelist Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Wild Shore". The final fifteen minutes of "Southland Tales" while undeniably beautiful, doesn't really make a lick of sense. This filmmaker could've gone the Peter Bogdonavich route and delivered a safe follow-up, akin to "Daisy Miller"(the film that preceeded this adaptation of the Henry James novel was, of course, "The Last Picture Show"), but instead, he threw down the gauntlet and made this rambling mess of a picture, which begs to be loved and hated in equal measures.

Tony J. gave it a10:
A truckload of taboos brought up in the most creative, twisted and natural light. There is absolutely no other film that will jerk your mind off like this.

Southland Tales Samuel Goldwyn Films

Southland Tales
Samuel Goldwyn Films