Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Cole ★★★★ 1

  It must have been so cool to have been a film fan during the New Hollywood. When all the movies coming out were so weird and different and experimental - it sounds like a magical time.

  This is the sort of delightful movie that could only have come out of that movement. It feels like it was based on a play - it takes place in one room, in real time, with a clear act break in the middle - but it's not. It's an original screenplay. Which is such a bizarre conceit to build your movie around that I can't help but give them props for committing to it as hard as they do.

  Which is not to say…

• 

  Review by Carlo V 4

  What's the point of anything when gems like this remain practically undiscovered? Why continue making movies? Why even bother scrolling through Netflix? I often wonder what happened to Dreyfuss, but then you see him shine in these movies that are basically stage plays and you understand that he was the type of actor who lost his place when Hollywood moved on. An absolute showcase of razor sharp dialogue and Acting with a capital A, delivered by people at the top of their game. Everyone absolutely kills it, but Veronica Cartwright's performance is some transcendent shit that most people aren't even aware is possible.

• 

  Review by theironcupcake ★★★★½ 11

  "We are not some pack of degenerates smearing some slime we shot in some seedy motel room across the stag party screens of America. We are pioneers, Rex. We are pioneers in the neoplastic arts. We are ever searching for that excuse to extend the boundaries of those arts beyond the limits of urgency!"
  "Plastic? I don't know what you're talking about!"

  Saturday Mini-Collab w/ AJ

  Stunted bananas and boner-ramas. Hideous, savage pleasure in the valley of indecency. Might as well unwrap the meat now because "the syphilitic perverts that are going to spend money to see this film don't even know they have eyeballs!" Who ever said that Hollywood was supposed to be a dream factory?

  Inserts is the…

• 

  Review by Sarah ★★★★ 2

  I have a lot of respect for this movie, I really do. It's oddly funny at the start, scathing in its depiction of the porn industry as a capitalist machine treating its women as meat with a promise of stardom and eroticism, especially biting at the suggestion to just continue shooting when an actress dies, saying she was dead from the start. Jessica Harper is fantastic, and the script is a sort of boozy, erect Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf—her cadence in every line read is spot on. That last thirty minutes itself is a short horror film about conditional consent, sex work, coercion, and victim blaming.
  That being said, I also would never like to see or touch Inserts with a ten foot pole again.

• 

  Review by matt lynch ★★½

  Really pleased with its own alleged transgressiveness. Remember, sex films aren't "real" films, and the people that make them are failed and miserable.

• 

  Review by pops baron ★★★★ 2

  jessica harper in this is one of the great performances

• 

  Review by C.A. DeStefanis ★★½

  For a film I was stoked to see, certain would totally be my jam and, as it turns out, featured a young Jessica Harper topless for a third of the film, Inserts fell flatter than a souffle' at a Deep Purple concert circa 1972.

  The film is never able to show a legitimate reason for it's existence. Call it a chamber piece, a study of the lives destroyed by talkies or a one act play written for the screen, sadly it never really manages to say much of anything. Much less, entertain. There were moments where it's pulse would quicken (specifically when Hoskins was around) but overall a dud to the nth degree.

  The performances are fine, but it never…

• 

  Review by AJ ★★★★ 2

  Mini-collab with Jetta

  Maybe we can shoot around it?… 
  You can’t shoot around it! Somebody’s dead up there!
  So are you when somebody points a camera at you. 

  There’s a lot that Inserts has going for it, enough that you’d think it would’ve been more widely rediscovered and championed at this point, but here we are. Some notables - Dreyfuss’ last movie before Jaws, Veronica Cartwright pre-Invasion of the Body Snatchers/Alien, Bob Hoskins pre-BBC Pennies from Heaven, and an all-too-rare Jessica Harper performance. Wild that Harper did Phantom of the Paradise before Inserts. 

  Veronica Cartwright is electric, Dreyfuss is bounding across the emotional spectrum in the way only Dreyfuss can (exasperation and muttered comebacks), and Harper goes from perfectly pitched…

• 

  Review by FedVal ★★★½

  Un film che ha un sapore decisamente teatrale dal punto di vista registico. Una mistura tra “Boogie Nights” e “Babylon”, ma più intimo e malinconicamente funereo. Il racconto spietato di una parte del mondo dello spettacolo (sconosciuta ai più) e del desiderio (vano e illusorio) di rimettersi sulla cresta dell’onda, di far parte ancora di “qualcosa di più grande” (il regista Boy Wonder rappresenta quello spirito ribelle che ha contraddistinto la Hollywood delle origini, ma lo studio system é già nell’aria, enfatizzato dalla figura prestante del produttore Big Mac). Un’opera avente come protagonisti un gruppo di scapestrati pronti a ritagliarsi un ruolo (anche da “inserti”) nell’intricata industria di Hollywood. Possiamo già vedere come il sesso rappresenti già una calamita per…

• 

  Review by Bill Chambers ★★★★

  Hard to believe this real-time narrative was never a play; it would kill on stage, though you'd need a pretty unself-conscious cast. Also curious: that the movie pings off Richard Dreyfuss's Richard Dreyfuss-ness long before he'd established a screen persona on which to riff. It's pre-emptive typecasting, in a way. Wonderful stuff, lots to unpack, not the least the '70s' fascination with Old Hollywood; one viewing's probably not going to cut it. Both actresses--a game Veronica Cartwright passes the baton to an even gamer Jessica Harper, effectively bifurcating the film--give performances of extraordinary soulfulness. Mostly I was glad to see my faith in John Byrum after being caught off-guard by his much-maligned The Razor's Edge was not misplaced.

• 

  Review by slackavetes

  Jessica Harper is the most perfect woman to ever exist.

  pretty great movie! very slow paced and shot as if it was a stage production, though it was never painful to watch, just well acted. Richard Dreyfuss and Bob Hoskins especially are fantastic.

• 

  Review by dankwit

  intriguingly splits the difference between a forgotten New Hollywood take on Boogie Nights and "Hustler Presents This Ain't The Day of the Locust XXX." there's some scenery chewed (dreyfuss and hoskins are turned up to 11 throughout) but everyone (even stephen davies aka Sam's Choice brand Paul Dano) goes above and beyond to make this work. a compelling curio that probably would not have ever happened at a time other than the mid 70s