Popular reviews

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 7

  "Nobody makes it. Nobody shows it. Nobody sees it."

  Opening the doors that shouldn't be opened, navigating the economy of a thing that doesn't exist, literally breaking through the sets all around you and finding nothing but your own failure. From an outsider's perspective, a California porn industry The Searchers is an undeniably ridiculous premise but as funneled through George C. Scott's pure hysterical boomer rage and Schrader's obviously personal relationship to this paranoid, sex-obsessed material there's just something about it that works. It feels like he's effectively exorcising his own repressed, conservative Midwest Calvinist upbringing and distant, abusive father in the gutter filth movie houses he escaped to and where his own career got started. The ending feels a…

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  Review by girlactress 16

  Sooo fun to watch…also I need carmel colored over the knee boots immediately!!

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 8

  74

  Paul Schrader's Calvinist odyssey, and total batshit self-seriousness. Look, you'd probably think George C. Scott diving into the sexual underworld is a great concept, and you'd be right, but you'd also be right in saying that it's a bad idea. This movie works because of its commitment, not necessarily because of the material. It's why many, but not all, of Paul Schrader's greatest accomplishments were given life by Scorsese's direction (Taxi Driver, Bringing out the Dead, Last Temptation of Christ). This yearned for an objective lens, a participant detached from the hellish descent. Often, Paul Schrader finds himself impassioned by the very issues that he places his characters within, and certain films benefit (Blue Collar, First Reformed) while others…

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  Review by street ★★★★ 10

  I wish I lived in the 1970s when it was real cool to be a pervert. :(

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  Review by Karsten ★★★★ 9

  Being that it’s 2:30am and this is my second Paul Schrader film of the night I’d much rather sleep on this and try to write something in depth in the morning. On the other hand I’m not gonna be able to sleep if I don’t get some sort of thoughts out there now. More terrifying than it is thought-provoking, oh look I’m already contradicting myself. The subtlety I’ve come to expect from Schrader’s critique(?) on religion was non-existent here. Not to say I didn’t enjoy how direct it was, from reading some other reviews I’m not alone in saying the TULIP scene was grrrreat. But all of this isn’t to say this is a bad movie, the slow descent into madness that I love so much about his work is very present here. I too was overwhelmed when I first went to LA! But for different reasons!

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  Review by Branson Reese 1

  So look. I agree that this would be better if Jake was more tempted by the tawdry porn underbelly of LA. For sure. Gotta give Pauline Kael that one. He's honestly a natural at being a porno guy from the second he starts playing ball and I would've loved to see him lose (or maybe discover??? Maybe it's a little of both??? could be fun??) some of himself as he's made complicit in the world of smut he's descending into as he hunts for his daughter. Would certainly make the ending more of a gut punch either way. But, like, come on. That doesn't make this a bad or even non-compelling movie. George C. Scott's performance is phenomenal. He plays…

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  Review by Ben Reiss ★★★★★ 14

  Paul Schrader’s Hardcore is essential Protestant cinema. Catholics have a buffet: Scorsese and Fellini and Sion Sono’s Love Exposure and many more. Protestants must settle for less. Bergman, Herzog (but only viewed through a funhouse mirror), and most explicitly Paul Schrader are the titans of Protestant cinema, and Hardcore is one of Schrader’s finest. 

  Hardcore, on paper, is about a Midwestern businessman searching for his missing daughter in a world of porn and sex. But our protagonist Jake Van Dorn, played by George C Scott in a career-defining performance, is a strict Calvinist (a division of Protestantism). Calvinists are not evangelists - they believe that it is pre-determined who goes to Heaven and who doesn’t. Those who are part of “the…

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  Review by sarah squirm ★★★★★ 4

  perfect movie, perfect score by phil spector crony

  “OH MY GOD. THATS MY DAUGHTER!!!!”

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  Review by Jay ★★★½

  possibly the hardest poster of all time

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  Review by Paul Schrader 7

  PAUL SCHRADER MATCHMAKER.

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  Review by Liz ★★★★½ 2

  ​For some reason, I'd always been under the impression that the scene in the theater was the climax and not the thing that kicks the plot into action?

  Released the same year that the Moral Majority formed, this almost serves as the linking point from the 70s nihilism of Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder to the 80s gutter sleazefests of Cruising and Vice Squad, reveling in the sordid melodrama and bare flesh of the porno industry without ever really condemning it. It's so weird watching this now, because everything about it feels so alien -- it's using sex shops, smutty paperbacks, porn theaters, 8mm loops, and s/m dungeons as signifiers of vice, but most of these don't really exist today. If this were to be remade, where would the George C. Scott character first see his daughter, on some porn tube site?

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  Review by Jerry ★★★ 7

                     JESUS IS COMING
                AND HE’S MAD AS HELL