The Neon Demon

I thought this was going to be a cinematic experience, but it's really just boring as hell. I almost had the feeling that the finale was just a beginner's attempt to shock as much as possible. And perhaps it worked a little because that suffocation can really affect a person. Very well acted. But otherwise, just disappointment from a boringly predictable, albeit intense, story that tries to be different in form. (11/10/2016)

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?" (23/09/2016)

An audio-visual feast with fantastic acting performances (an excellent Desmond Harrington). The inner storyline is quite interesting, but overall the story lacks dynamism. As always, Winding Refn is in no hurry, but unfortunately the world of modeling offers no excuse for action, which occasionally helped Drive forward a little (also in places in Only God Forgives), the lesson is fairly simple, bizarre, but still clear, but it’s difficult to sum up the entire movie in a single intellectual exercise about the significance of individual scenes. The main problem, apart from the traditional remoteness, was the length. And so you must see the movie if only for the corpse licker and the visually refined composition of images. You’ll have to battle against viewer fatigue, because the Neon Demon has no soul. (25/09/2016)

Refn is one of those directors that I always wished would make a horror film. The announcement of Neon Demon fulfilled one of my dreams as a cinemagoer and the expectations couldn’t have been higher. After the responses from the première in Cannes, I still believed the film will grip and captivate me instead of sending me to the other side of the fence, with the disgusted and annoyed viewers. But in the end it was worse – it was just meh! Boring. It didn’t arouse any emotions, positive or negative. Audiovisually, it’s beautifully empty. (12/09/2016)

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. (06/10/2016)