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Critics reviews

CARLOS

Olivier Assayas France, 2010
Assayas set out to make a thriller, and he succeeds so brilliantly that you can watch all five and a half hours in a sitting, constantly gripped by the twists and turns of a plot that is faithful to history but just as faithful to suspense. It is this that allows Assayas and Ramírez to keep us with the film. We register both the general history and the individual portrait, but we are constantly waiting for the next shot, for the angle and perspective from which the next bullet will come.
September 26, 2011
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Assayas maintains a near-constant sense of movement (in terms of both the camera and the storytelling overall), an ability to convey entire milieus through seemingly casual detail, an invigorating use of music (particularly early post-punk), and a confidence with actors that yields uniformly charismatic performances. And yet these qualities have been streamlined in such a way that CARLOS works as an exemplary suspense movie or a docudrama.
December 3, 2010
The director seems to have devoted an impressive amount of work to historical research, the construction of the script, the casting, the location scouting, the physical staging of the action, the direction of actors, and even the selection of music—and seems to have left decisions about the use of the camera for last, and least. The impression left by this considerable, intelligent film is that of homework done well.
October 22, 2010
These psychological speculations, and occasional exposition drops, are like little pebbles of emphasis lumped into a swift rush of process-oriented narrative... Carlos's movement through the movement hardly encompasses all the various experiences of war and terror, government and politics, lived through in parallel, tributary and intersecting lives.
October 7, 2010
As much as part three suggests the global evolution of Summer Hours, its form is not unlike the disorienting finale of demonlover expanded to feature-length; it covers the most chronological time and different locations of the three films, finishing up with Carlos's arrest in Khartoum and extradition back to France in 1994. This Carlos of Assayas's imagination is more compelling than the iteration we met in part one, even if he's somewhat less factual.
October 4, 2010
A dazzling exfoliation of the roots of modern discontent, Carlos is staggering; no more important movie will be released this year.
September 29, 2010
Moving Image Source
...Assayas's epic thriller is a subtle piece of political analysis that shrewdly appropriates genre conventions.
September 23, 2010
The House Next Door
Because Carlos is, for the most part, an intellectual achievement rather than a visceral or emotional one, it's the kind of movie that can be far easier to admire than to love. But in its grand ambition and uncompromising intelligence, it is certainly not a film to easily dismiss.
September 20, 2010
Carlos is always most revealing when watching the Jackal act and react rather than recite Marxist chestnuts, because the film, like Boarding Gate, is ultimately one transfixed by movement: the swift, decisive physicality of its protagonist, the rise-and-fall trajectory of his career, and the larger ways in which on-the-ground terror operations always begin far, far away, behind locked doors where amoral government bigwigs politely buy and sell lives for geopolitical advantage.
September 19, 2010
Avoiding the trademark sentimentality that defined genre benchmark Army of Shadows, Assayas instead draws out comparisons to iconic tragic rockers of the '70s and early '80s.
September 1, 2010
The House Next Door
To start with, it's a biopic, and I don't much like biopics unless they're doing something genuinely radical with the form, which Carlos quite frankly does not. So there's a lot of dutiful information-delivery and this-happened-then-this-happened dramaturgy. But unlike rote hackwork like Ray or Walk the Line, Carlos has an honest-to-goodness director with an honest-to-goodness artistic sensibility behind it.
May 20, 2010
Destined for an American opening, most likely by way of the New York Film Festival, Carlos is gripping stuff, despite its incongruously fashionable rock soundtrack and a grossly over-played final section. The extended account of the OPEC caper includes the festival's best hour of filmmaking this side of Godard's Film Socialisme and would make a terrific movie in its own right.
May 20, 2010