derek-duerden

... but someone should have called a halt to this before it made it to release!

Along the lines of "let's get four or five REALLY good actors (and that idiot Garrel) and get them to play a very meta scenario intermingling "real life" and "the film", and make some elliptical comments about AI, filmmaking and the state of the world along the way." Shame it doesn't really work, and it's certainly not funny. I feel sorry for the Cannes audience who presumably had to pretend they liked it on the night.

I must say that I have really enjoyed some of Quentin's earlier films (such as Mandibles and Smoking Causes Coughing) so was quite ready for something weird and, frankly, if it wasn't him I would have bailed on this fairly early on. But ultimately this came across as one of those homework essays that you produced on a Sunday night when you didn't really feel like it, but had to hand *something* in on the Monday morning, even if it was rubbish and not ready.

Hopefully his next film will be a return to form.

Unlike Herzog's remake of 1979 (featuring the stellar pairing of Kinski and Adjani), after this I ended up thinking "why did you bother?"

There's very little that's innovative and, for me, lots of jarring elements which were just distracting - not least the pointlessly VERY LOUD segments which had us thinking of leaving fairly early on. As others have noted, Orlok's voice and mustache were laughable rather than scary, and some of the acting was very poor (e.g. Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Mind you, I think everyone was struggling with the poor script and dialogue. You can't make a great film on cinematography alone...

Hoult does well with the first half but then he's rather sidelined and the film also seems to lose its way until the fairly predictable climax - by which time, like Lily-Rose, I was ready to go also.

Disappointing.