Critics reviews

By integrating [Al] Gore's assertions [from An Inconvenient Truth]... Abel Ferrara delivers, in 4:44 Last Day on Earth, a modest version, where doubt, hesitation and fragility reign. Here the spaces, the objects, the scenographies are transformed more or less into a confessional, where everything is worthy of adoration: religious icons and statues, of course... but also photographs and computers, embraced as if they truly contained the images whose appearances they transmit.

Of all the recent movies to imagine apocalypse, 4:44 strikes me as the saddest. It's the most resolute in its vision and the most believable in its onscreen behavior. Perhaps the hysterical outbursts that ran through Ferrara's movies until now were leading up to this: what seemed like exaggerations of everyday anxiety were in fact preparations for the end of the world.

4:44 Last Day on Earth is a blunt, sexy call for unmotivated kindness, and it’s one of the most moving and beautiful films of Ferrara’s career.

I'm not sure there's a more affecting moment in Ferrara's post-'80s oeuvre (still haven't seen the early stuff) than the Vietnamese delivery guy's Skype conversation with his family back home, very wisely left unsubtitled. But I'm afraid I do have to register the standard objections, beginning with Shanyn Leigh and her inexpressive anti-gaze.

Hidden within Ferrara's distinctly disordered approach, 4:44 achieves an unexpected, powerful simplicity.

4:44's often erratic acting and typically uncomfortably strange and directly intuitive engagement with its subject may distance one from conventional cinema dramaturgy, but this is replaced with a kind of purity of expression, odes and gestures to human failings and life’s most powerful things on an intimate, urban and highly specific scale.