Popular reviews

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  Review by Steve Sandberg ★★★ 1

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★

  "It's not living. Just existing"

  Spoilers below

  In the near distant dystopian future, William Geld (Tim Robbins), a fraud investigator hot on the tail of a ring of criminals who produce fake travel documents, impregnates a clone of his mother after beginning an affair with the groups leader Maria (Samantha Morton). If you've been looking for a movie where Tim Robbins plays a character who has sex with his mom, here it is! 

  There are some good ideas here and the film should be applauded for being unapologetically pro freedom of movement. The idea that people can be given viruses for empathy and to make someone not want to sleep with anyone with more than a 25% genetic match is…

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  Review by chavel ★★★

  Code 46 has a curious and entrancing sci-fi spell that doesn’t entirely satisfy dramatically, yet that wasn't a critical dealbreaker. The future looks much like our own except more bureaucratically regulated. Laws of the future dictate couples are forbidden to reproduce unless their DNA codes are a good progressive match. Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton are not a good-looking couple together, but they regard each other with a taboo interest – even though their lust is kind of impersonal and detached with very little emotional nakedness. To be sexual with another person is to primarily satiate his or her own self.

  Michael Winterbottom is the globe-trotting director with a fantastic visual eye (he shot it in Shanghai, Dubai, and Rajasthan), and all his disaffected irony is part of the point he’s making. Provokes an intellectual reaction but even at 90-minutes you have to be in the mood for something this cold.

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  Review by Raventomb ★★★

  How far would you go for love? Would you commit a crime? Would you jeopardise your career and your family? Tim Robbins does just that as fraud investigator William, who’s dispatched to the Shanghai office of shady uber-corporation ‘The Sphinx’ to ferret out a suspected racketeer in this dystopian drama.

  This is primarily a love story, which is perhaps the easiest aspect to disseminate for what is otherwise a confused tale with some interesting anti-establishment musings and some curious expository ideas, none of which are particularly well formed. The love story itself sticks out due to Samantha Morton and Tim Robbins performances. Robbins is decent enough and looks every bit the beleaguered businessman. Morton has the same curious allure that…

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  Review by Julian (Seeking Film) ★★½

  Code 46 preceding 2046 by only a year is quite amusing when you think about it beyond the similarities of their titles. When it comes to longingly horny transnational sci-fi, there was simply no way Wong Kar-wai was going to be bested by the guy whose most famous orchestration of sexual tension is the ongoing bond between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. To put it another way—a way that actually gets to the point—while Michael Winterbottom's intimately ambitious undertaking can be appreciated in its world-building, the one aspect that drives a narrative such as this is sorrily lacking: the chemistry of its leads.

  Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton appear well-cast in the roles they're given, but fall utterly short of…

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  Review by mosquitodragon ★★★½

  It’s really quite breathtaking what a profoundly convincing dystopian world Michael Winterbottom has managed to conjure in Code 46, despite deploying nothing in the way of futurism in art design. I’m pretty sure he has only used real world sets, but has created the illusion of future dystopia in the way these locations have been used. And also by way of editing to change the very topography of the world.

  Our protagonist William Geld (Tim Robbins) travels into Shanghai from its airport through a vast desert. Our knowledge that no such desert exists (today) is an example of this film’s placement of incongruous elements to suggest that everything is different in this narrative. Even language is used in this way…

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝 ½

  What is it with Michael Winterbottom? How can a man who is capable of directing genuinely excellent films like 24 Hour Party People and Wonderland also, just within a few years, be knocking out utter, utter crap like 9 Songs and Code 46? I know it's probably to do with expanding his directorial horizons and trying different things or something like that. But I'd rather he stop piddling around and just made less films like this and more, well, not like this.

  Code 46 is really, really bad. It starts off intriguing and within about 15 minutes has turned really, really stupid. It is partially, and I mean only partially, rescued to a small degree by Samantha Morton turning in…

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  Review by Dasha ★★

  Of all the crazy things that happened in this, I most couldn't believe that it ended with a Coldplay song

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  Review by Grooveman ★★★

  I dug the score, cinematography, the lean runtime, and got some serious Assayas and Soderbergh vibes. Shame it’s pretty boring.

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  Review by Jordan Barbosa ★★

  The kind of movie you get when someone REALLY wants to be Charlie Kaufmann but doesn’t have the wit or chops to pull it off.

  I love a good heady, minimalist sci-fi flick. They poke around at interesting ideas and throw you until a world like ours but everything slightly off instead doing the big explosive nonsense that don’t really mean anything. This tries to be one of those movies along the lines of Gattaca or Eternal Sunshine but it completely misses the mark. The ideas are interesting, especially in the depiction of the surveillance state and Robbins’ empathy virus, but muddled. The main conflict of the film is based around not doing incest with a weird oedipal vibe. Sure,…

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  Review by Mihow ★★★ 3

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

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  Review by Jaime Rebanal 🇵🇸 ★★★

  Michael Winterbottom has one of the most fascinating directorial careers to me; because it seems like he'll put his name on so many things but he's also at his most consistent as long as Steve Coogan's in the picture. Alas, that's where we enter Code 46, a romantic movie of sorts set in a dystopian world where biotechnology has reached a point where people's genetics can easily be forged.

  It feels like Winterbottom's also got a hold of so many ideas on the spot but he doesn't quite know where exactly he's going. There's at least enough interest being formed by the chemistry that Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton share with one another, but perhaps Winterbottom focusing only on the simplistic elements of this narrative only keep him from really letting Code 46 take off in any truly meaningful manner.