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100Everything matters in Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, but not everything is necessarily the same as DeLillo's book. And that makes the film, as a series of discussions about inter-related money-minded contradictions, insanely rich and maddeningly complex. We can't wait to rewatch it.
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Aug 12, 201288Diamond-hard and dazzlingly brilliant, David Cronenberg's film plays like a deeply perverse, darkly comic successor to Videodrome.
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80A cold, funny number about the erotics of money and the seduction of death.
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80Conventional it is not. Engrossing it is.
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Aug 15, 201280It's Cronenberg's most willfully weird movie since "Spider," and it should prove a tough sell despite Pattinson's ample star power.
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80An eerily precise match of filmmaker and material, Cosmopolis probes the soullessness of the 1% with the cinematic equivalent of latex gloves.
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80Director David Cronenberg - who knows a thing or two about bodily expressions - understands, finally, what to do with the Twilight star, turning his zombified handsomeness into a stark canvas upon which we can project our own anxieties.
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75Cosmopolis may be a cerebral mood piece, but it is loaded with strong performances that connect on an emotional level.
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75This mesmerizing mind-bender ought to prove two things: (1) Robert Pattinson really can act; (2) Director David Cronenberg never runs from a challenge.
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75Since 2005's "A History of Violence," Cronenberg has ventured beyond the grotesque allegorical interests of his earlier movies, a shift that has led some longtime fans to assume he has softened up. As an enjoyably peculiar anti-capitalist indictment, Cosmopolis proves otherwise.
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Aug 15, 201275Pattinson does a quietly marvelous thing in finding vulnerability in Eric without making it seem like softness.
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75The trouble with Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg's faithful-to-a-fault adaptation from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel, is that it's more metaphor than meat.
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70Cosmopolis is frustrating, funny, thought-provoking, weird, maddening, worthwhile. It isn't a great movie. Sometimes it's not a good one. Sometimes it is. Ultimately, it is one worth working through, a valuable exercise if you're willing to make the effort.
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70Cronenberg has made an eccentric and beautiful-looking movie - a languid, deadpan, conceptualist joke.
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Aug 18, 201270Cosmopolis is often beautiful, but at times it feels like a movie sealed off from itself.
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70Because I've long been captivated by Cronenberg's keen intelligence and highly personal cinematic vision, I took a strange pleasure in submitting to this movie's stilted but weirdly poetic rhythms. But I freely acknowledge that for others, enduring Cosmopolis may be less fun than a backseat prostate exam.
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67The journey on which he takes us may not satisfy in the ways we normally ask of movies, but if it did it wouldn't be a Cronenberg, would it?
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67As a portrait of both man and society in exquisitely poised decline, it's harrowing, hilarious, and horrific in equal measure.
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63The rapid dialogue is dry and mannered, like a David Mamet play, there's virtually no story and Cronenberg's visual scheme is cold and claustrophobic.
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63I just wish Cronenberg hadn't adapted the book on his own. Behind the camera, he does remarkable things, turning Packer's limo into what Cronenberg himself has described as an upscale version of "Das Boot." But the playlets constituting the whole are thick, stubbornly undramatic affairs; the verbiage is lumpy, self-conscious.
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Aug 30, 201250It feels like each and every moment bursts forth with urgent dialogue, and yet what does anyone actually say?
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50There's not really a movie there, nothing that sustains itself from scene to scene and nothing that's worth watching from beginning to end.
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50The novel is extremely funny. It's hilarious as well as horrific (all sorts of bad things are going on outside the limo - and a few inside of it, too). Yet whenever the movie is funny, it feels like a mistake. Comedy has never been a Cronenberg strength.
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50Its characters are bloodless, their speech monotone. If there are people like this, I hope David Cronenberg's film is as close as I ever get to them. You couldn't pay me to see it again.
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50Robert Pattinson must be hellbent on escaping the world of sparkly-skinned undead to take on the starring role in the leaden, obtuse and ultra-pretentious Cosmopolis.
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50As Pattinson nears the bottom - both of his fortune, and to all appearances, his sanity - Cronenberg has to take the film somewhere, emptying out into a confrontation between Pattinson and a disgruntled former employee (Paul Giamatti) that never fully ties together all that's come before.
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Aug 14, 201250To the extent that Cosmopolis functions as a super-literal conceptual exercise, it's simultaneously irritating and fascinating.
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50The film comes off as an elaborately didactic and overheated lecture.
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40Alas, in Cronenberg's hands, it just comes across as cold and lifeless and exhausting.
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40It is a disappointment coming from writer-director David Cronenberg, who has proved such a master at mind games. Cronenberg is perhaps too faithful to the book. The topic is provocative and certainly timely, but the film never achieves the incisive power of his best work, "A History of Violence" for one. Even an A-list ensemble that includes Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and Paul Giamatti can't save it.
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40There are plenty of ideas to gnaw on, given that Cronenberg has adapted Don DeLillo's intense novel of a New York on the verge of dystopian breakdown. But frustratingly bland work from lead Robert Pattinson results in an awfully watery stew.
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40After a strong run of films during the past decade, David Cronenberg blows a tire with Cosmopolis.
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30Vapid, claustrophobic drama.
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25The climax is as dull as reading the dictionary of a language you do not speak.
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25Sometimes, even a little gratuitous nudity can't save a movie. This is one of those occasions. Cosmopolis easily trumps "To Rome with Love" as the biggest disappointment of 2012 from an established director.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 22
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Mixed: 3 out of 22
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Negative: 12 out of 22
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5
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10This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.