Popular reviews

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  Review by HombreGato ★★ 3

  Act 1: Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda want to fuck.
  Act 2: Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda want to fuck.
  Act 3: Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda want to fuck.

  Epilogue: Saudi Arabia may be duplicitously orchestrating financial collapse of the Western world by positioning itself as ally to American business and political interests to facilitate a hidden agenda.

  Assuming Kris Kristofferson and Jane Fonda still want to fuck, this movie remains relevant today.

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  Review by Blair Russell ★★½

  There’s a reason why you probably haven’t heard of this film before. I hadn’t until a Letterboxd mutual reviewed it shortly after Kris Kristofferson passed away several months ago. That person’s review was negative yet the film sounded so odd, I was still intrigued. Every copy I could find online was in SD so that was put on the backburner. When TCM played the movie Monday night as part of its tribute to Kris, it was at the end of a run that included the expected like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and A Star is Born. Thus, the DVR recording was made.

  Yes, their copy was also SD but who knows if even any boutique label will ever be…

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★

  "You can't beat the system"

  After her husband is murdered, Lee Winters (Jane Fonda), teams up with Hubbell -yes this is really the character's name- Smith (Kris Kristofferson) and the two find themselves drawn into the shadowy world of intrigue as they chase a massive score of international oil money. 

  Rollover features a cast of unlikeably ghoulish profiteers who prattle endlessly on about profit margins and tactical risk assessment. It's hard to believe that a film from Alan J. Pakula (All the President's Men, The Parallax View) could be so entirely lacking in thrills. The whole thing feels like accidentally wandering into a random board room and being stuck watching a business presentation without any context of what the hell…

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  Review by teamgal ★★★

  Alan J. Pakula tries his darndest to make finance exciting, but there's only so much a filmmaker can do with numbers. Even today, telephone calls, people shouting orders, computer screens flashing balances and exchange rates are not the stuff of great cinema. Pakula even rips himself off in an attempt to energize the material: he reunites the female lead, composer, costume designer and art director of his earlier KLUTE, and even stages a few interviews with informers in case we'd forgotten he'd made ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. I'll give him credit, though, for here he is, six years before WALL STREET, pioneering this type of film.

  Jane Fonda's participation marks her first major departure from the highly politicized roles she'd…

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  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★ 2

  3rd Alan J. Pakula (after All The President's Men and The Pelican Brief)

  1/27- Great Director Misfires

  What causes a misfire? A film being made in the wrong era for the subject matter? A case of the director having the material taken out of their hands and changed against their will? Personal tragedy obscuring the work? Even harder to consider is what classifies a misfire, for some directors go through their careers continuously producing works of incredible quality. These are all things I'm considering in this series, inspired by Lou Ferrigno's reviews he did last month.

  I've chosen Rollover to kick this off as it was one of the first films that came to mind, both for its lack of…

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  Review by Sonny_Jim ★★½ 2

  Alan Pakula pivots from political to financial paranoia thriller with mixed results. A murder kicks things off, and I guess there are a few sporadic bursts of intrigue, but when one of your nerviest scenes involves Kristofferson hiding from Hume Cronyn while waiting on a dot matrix printer to churn out banking transactions, that says something.

  The film plays with a few interesting ideas—mostly about what a house of cards the global economy is and how its continued solvency seems to hinge on the bigger players always behaving in the most predictable way. The most interesting thing is the antagonists don't seem to be breaking any financial laws. All their nefarious acts are to keep things quiet and maintain secrecy…

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  Review by Rock 2

  The premise of this geopolitical financial romantic thriller seemed too good to pass up, but honestly this isn’t very good. Alan J. Pakula is mostly known for some great conspiracy thrillers, but I don’t think he has a feel for the one here. It takes way too long for the characters to develop any curiosity or suspicion or for any investigative element to transpire. I’m not normally one of the plot hole police, but Ebert is right that the villainous conspiracy doesn’t seem all that difficult to detect and the coverup attempts are even clumsier. 

  I liked seeing Kris Kristofferson (R.I.P.) and Jane Fonda together, but their relationship seemed a weird fit for the straight faced handling of the material.…

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  Review by Michael501 📺 ★★½ 1

  1981 In Review - December 
  #9

  The wife of a murdered petrochemical company chairman (Jane Fonda) and a banker (Kris Kristofferson) investigating the liquidity of his new bank stumble upon an international financial scheme that could lead to global economic collapse. 

  When Jane Fonda inherits her murdered husband's stock shares in his financial company, she gets entangled in a dangerous international scheme. She also falls for banker Kris Kristofferson, so that's a nice bonus.
  The story is very hard to follow and poorly constructed with shallow characters. The story is not terribly easy to grasp for the average person in my opinion and not presented to the audience clearly enough-nor well enough to garner much interest and/or curiosity. Fonda appears…

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  Review by Jenna Ipcar ★★ 1

  I’ll be real with y’all, I barely understood the plot of this film (and from judging Kris Kristofferson’s line readings, he didn’t either) but considering this is two hours of stonks and Jane Fonda being horny, culminating in a Saudi-Arabian-lead global societal collapse that, I can only presume, is the direct cause of the Mad Max universe…. It’s kinda great.

  Also the NYC locations in this are genuinely rad. Like, don’t get me wrong, this movie is terrible and boring. But it’s pretty… pretty great.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★

  I remember thinking this was terrible, but while it is dull movie in that way Pakula can be at times and the machinations are hardly dramatized, it does finds ways to locate images of power and the constant moving camera do suggest a fascination with palace intrigue that's more engaging than he often gets. Kristofferson is very miscast in the male lead and his romance with Fonda a compromise to let the movie go easy. It never escapes the feeling of a lecture, at some point Hume Cronyn gets a speech that starts "Money, capital, has a life of its own. It's a force of the nature like gravity, like the oceans, it flows where it wants to flow", so it is that kind of movie, but at least most of its misgivings about global capital feel earned.

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  Review by Marty McKee ★

  Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson star in Orion’s steamy thriller about international high finance. Despite direction by KLUTE’s and THE PARALLAX VIEW’s Alan J. Pakula, ROLLOVER never catches fire, nor does the somnambulant chemistry between its leading players. Unsurprisingly, audiences were uninterested in screenwriter David Shaber’s confusing mishmash of electronic transactions, lending limits, short currency positions, and secret numbered accounts, and ROLLOVER was a major box office flop. Fonda (THE CHINA SYNDROME) is Lee Winters, a former movie star who inherits most of a massive chemical company following the murder of her husband. A beardless Kristofferson (HEAVEN’S GATE), ludicrously miscast as a Wall Street mastermind, is Hubbell Smith, a financial troubleshooter who helps Lee negotiate both the purchase of a…

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  Review by Luke Thorne ★★

  Alan J. Pakula’s thriller in which a widow (Jane Fonda) takes charge of her husband’s firm after his homicide and is aided by a financial expert (Kris Kristofferson) to face new rivals. 

  The story concerns Lee Winters (Jane Fonda), the go-getting widow of a killed petrochemical company chairman, and Hubbell Smith (Kris Kristofferson), an expert referred by the First New York Bank chairman Maxwell Emery (Hume Cronyn) to examine the liquidity of one of their banks, fall for one another and join forces to get to the bottom of things. 

  Their examinations lead them to the finding of a worldwide financial plan embroiling her husband’s firm and the Arab states that might result in global business collapse and render U.S.…