Double Take

Weston Campbell

Unique exploration of cold-war politics using the rich field of Hitchcockology as a template.

El Biffo

"If I could just make a decent cup of coffee, I could relax". Any film featuring Laika, the cosmonaut dog, gets at least 3.8 stars from me. 3.8 stars!

Matthew Martens

Grimonprez and McCarthy are a couple of very knowing characters, so it's no surprise that they made such a knowing film together. Still, as amusing and clever as their cold war critique/pastiche/piss-take consistently is, it nevertheless feels a bit forced and faded, as dated in its way as the Folgers ads it recurringly mocks. Not quite fresh-perked, this cuppa postmodernism.

MATTEO BITTANTI

Grimonprez' meta-doc has prelingerian mood. There's also a bit of Paul Virilio - e.g. media and war, the discussion on what matters more, space exploration or television (obviously, television: => as we all know popular culture killed Communism in the Eastern block). Good stuff.

Christopher R. Smith

It gets off to an uneasy start, trying to interweave conventions of the archival documentary with post-modern pontificating. But eventually does coalesce into a very engrossing experimental work, though some elements are more compelling than others. Flawed, but fascinating.

Jason

DOUBLE TAKE is more hybrid film than documentary proper, essentially a modulated assemblage that feels felt into existence. Impressionistic in that sense and also funny-poetic. Convergences and associations are often opaque or just plain strange or resistant of traditional hard-and-fast sense-making. Grimonprez has been down this road before. He is the next great found footage artist after Craig Baldwin.

msmichel

Director Grimonprez and scripter Tom McCarthy have crafted a lovely puzzle box of a film using archival footage splicing together the cold war, Alfred Hitchcock, old Folgers commercials and more into a clever narrative. For the film and history buff a delight if one can keep one's tongue firmly in cheek.

mjgildea

I'm not exactly sure what the hell was supposed to be going on here but once I was no longer disoriented I kind of enjoyed it. Double Take definitely got an emotional reaction out of me (ganking the score from Psycho did most of the work) and by the end I didn't mind any of the nonsense along the way.