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| Tookey's Review |
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| Pro Reviews |
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| Mixed Reviews |
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| Anti Reviews |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2013 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
OVERRATED
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
96 |
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Upstream Colour is cinema at its most infuriatingly pretentious.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Nine years ago, writer-director-actor Sane Carruth’s first film, Primer, gathered respectful reviews but tiny audiences. I found that abstruse and self-indulgent, but compared with this it was simple and straightforward.
Friends of the film will doubtless call it “challenging” and “visionary”. Maybe it’s bourgeois and reactionary of me to expect things like an intelligible story, interesting characters or meaning.
Some critics have evidently taken to heart Bob Dylan’s admonition “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand” and are hailing Carruth’s even more inchoate second as the future of cinema. If that’s true, cinema is about to experience a short, not very lingering death from audience indifference.
With its cliched, counter-productive ideas of what makes an art-house movie deep – unintelligible plotting, ponderous pacing, poorly acted characters gazing vacantly into space, meaningless images of wildlife - it makes the average Terrence Malick film look like The Dam Busters.
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. Amy Seimetz, Thiago Martins, Andrew Sensenig
