Popular reviews

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  Review by starboy ★★★★½ 1

  Film: fades in "Are you aware of your own Existence?" in big black letters
  me: has an immediate existential crisis

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  Review by Peter H ★★★ 2

  Though apparently a darling of the festival circuit (especially in Europe) 1 occupies a narrow niche for commercial appeal. Perhaps that's why it's never been released on DVD in North America. Too pulpy for the arthouse and too artsy for the grindhouse, 1 provides a (kinda sorta) sci-fi twist on the well-established postmodern mystery genre. Despite being chock-a-block full of pretentious dialogue and obtuse plotting, a cogent discussion of modern technology and media tumbles out.

  The story sees all the books in a prestigious book store suddenly and mysteriously replaced with copies of "1", a never before seen book that catalogs exhaustive statistics about all the events humans go through in a single minute. How many deaths (cross-tabulated by cause…

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  Review by Conor ★★★½ 2

  A rare bookstore in a dystopian alternate reality suddenly has its inventory replaced one evening with copies of a mysterious book titled 1, which has "few words but many more numbers." Detective Phil Pitch of the Reality Defence Institute (Zoltán Mucsi) leads an investigation at a remote surrealistic compound where they interrogate the four people who were in the store at the time the tomes appeared: bitter owner Al F. Eveson (Pál Mácsai), bookish clerk Maya Satin (Vica Kerekes), mute janitor Angus Anderson (Balazs Czukor), and cryptic 'citizen of the Vatican' Swan Tamel (Lászlo Sinkó). As the four suspects slowly begin to behave in ways that range from lustfully loony to strangely stoic, order breaks down in the RDI's asylum/dolphin…

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  Review by PetersMovyLogs ★★★

  I wasn't quite ready for this one! I thought I was turning on a standard mystery movie 😆 but that's like turning on Twin Peaks for the basic mystery of who killed Laura Palmer 😂 much larger questions are raised and deeper rabbit holes are fallen into which one must be ready for!

  I don't know that I cared enough about this one to revisit it though. There's lots of interesting questions posed and plenty of musings put out there. I feel like this was put together with care if one wanted to take the time and piece it together. I just don't know if it seemed worth going over again, for me at least.

  "Reality is a matter of…

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  Review by Dennis Nedry ★★★

  This movie (loosely based on a Stanislav Lem story) is stylish and initially alluring, because of its hunger to be different and its desire to give the audience (or "spectator", is probably the better word) an experience. The production design is especially attractive (made by the director, who would later be the PD on THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY), especially in the beginning of the movie where it briefly (and needlessly, as it turns out) suggests a genre plot: All the books in a book-store suddenly become the mysterious work "1", written by ? and of unknown origin. There's the unnecessary inclusion of an old weary cop (albeit well played by Zoltán Mucsi), which only confuses you into believing that the…

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  Review by Spencer Lee ★★★ 1

  Very similar vibes to Hartley's Book Of Life. Meditative sci-fi based on a short story by the same guy who wrote Solaris. A little disjointed but still a fascinating watch.

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  Review by Respectndhdshhsshsget What widk we tjrjjrhrbrbrbr ★

  One two fwee foe five

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  Review by 🫧

  la vd q me la pela solo puedo pensar ne que x mucho q lo intente no puedo cambiar mi nombre de redes sociales a @mayonesitafumona (mis redes sociales en concreto: mi suscripción al periódico, la del ajedrez y la subasta online de objetos raros) jajaja ah bueno y esta

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  Review by Aedwacer ★★★½

  "Ser una persona significa, primero de todo, tener una vida del espíritu, y no una anatomía sujeta a la suma, división y multiplicación. El mismísimo hecho de que la vida del espíritu no pueda ser medida y puesta en forma estadística refuta la pretensión de los autores de haber producido un retrato de la humanidad" -Un Minuto Humano

  Esta película fue inspirada en un cuento de ciencia ficción de Stanislaw Lem, el mismo autor de Solaris. Y en este cuento también se repite un tema central que es la crítica al objetivismo, o sea, la noción de que la realidad y por ende el ser humano también como participante de ella pueden ser conocidos a través de datos y unidades…

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  Review by Anton Bitel

  "a mystery all at once of the locked-room, political and theological varieties, and an adaptation in no way merely by numbers."
  More at Projected Figures

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  Review by Malvad ★★

  The worst thing with a certain amount of cinema directors these days is that they want to make a film that is new and that has never been seen before, never been done before, that stands out from the rest by its own uniqueness. And the premise of this film has definitely got something going for it. The problem that this and many other filmmaker has got these days is that it's all very well trying to showcase your "uniqueness" when you fall into a lot of the same traps as everyone else. You make the same clichéd stylistic choices, the dialogues become either too cluttered or too clichéd, colour grading and the acting that initially starts strong quickly lapses…

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  Review by kuboa

  Wish I could say this was a hidden gem, because the premise sounded interesting. The digital blue-grey color grading is distractingly dated and ugly. The hyperactive dialogue is annoying and hard to follow. There are some interesting shots but most of the time it reminded me of late-2000s cable dramas. I won’t rule out a re-watch, but it’s not anytime soon.