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A little like guided meditation with suggestions floated, waiting, left untethered. It's up to you to distill meaning -- which will leave some convinced the director is merely self-indulgent, and others deeply satisfied.
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80Like everything Jarmusch, The Limits of Control is calibrated for cool.
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75Almost absurdly quiet and observant, The Limits of Control is about the space between the action, the steps along the way.
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60Cool, handsome, self-assured... but, as the existentialists might say, what's the bloody point?
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60A nondramatic work best appreciated as a pure image-and-sound event.
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58Too much of The Limits Of Control feels canned and airless, so stifled by Jarmusch's obsessions that it loses all sense of surprise.
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50Unfortunately, the whole seldom adds up to the sum of its illustrious parts, and Jarmusch's trademark deadpan quirks seem to have gotten lost in the translation.
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50Even the great ones hit snags. With The Limits of Control, Jim Jarmsuch gets tangled up in his own deadpan.
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50While The Limits of Control offers some picturesque photography and grist for thought, it is ultimately too much like The Emperor's New Clothes to warrant anything approaching enthusiasm. The message is banal and the means by which it is presented reeks of artifice and pretention.
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50Only a few events happen in this minimalist film, and most of them keep getting repeated through most of its running time.
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50As it is, the movie's lethal climax, with its vague protest against corporate control--and hence in favor of art, music, drugs, or whatever--feels like a poor theft from a more conventional film.
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42The Limits of Control, even with its flow of star cameos (Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, a frenetic Bill Murray), is a listless long pause that rarely refreshes.
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42It's exactly the film Jarmusch wanted to make, but it's also smug, excruciating, borderline pointless. You could call it a deliberate effort to invert the conventions of the thriller; you could also call it, more rightly, a self-deluded disaster.
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40Worst of all, it just feels tired and recycled.
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38This is one of those movies that's too cool to have a plot.
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38It might be that Jarmusch (Broken Flowers) is experimenting with creating a pastiche of dreamlike sequences that audiences can interpret as they wish. Or it may be merely pretension and hubris that fuels such a stylized and insubstantial story.
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38Jarmusch has come up with a dud.
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30Jarmusch makes some effort to deliver on the promise of suspense near the end, with de Bankole stalking despicable businessman Bill Murray at his fortresslike compound in the hills.
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25The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.
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20This beautifully shot and painstakingly constructed film is a self-indulgent bucket of hogwash.
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12Jarmusch is making some kind of a point. I think the point is that if you strip a story down to its bare essentials, you will have very little left. I wonder how he pitched this idea to his investors.
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0Jim Jarmusch's Dada meander, shot by Christopher Doyle, is empty and excruciating -- that's really all you need to know.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 4 out of 5
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Mixed: 0 out of 5
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Negative: 1 out of 5
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MichaelB0Yes, how did he get the backers for this empty nonsense, he obviously didn't show them the rushes.
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JamesJ.10
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DH9