Recensioni de* critic*

This is a film rich in ideas but with very little tension or passion. At times, it’s more like a cerebral art gallery installation piece than a full-blooded dramatic movie.

Crimes of the Future is very much a “late” Cronenberg film, dovetailing with and referencing his more cerebral works like Videodrome, Crash and Cosmopolis... from roughly The Dead Zone on, Cronenberg has been able to invest his work with an air of such lyricism, here making Crimes of the Future into one of the most masterful and intellectually stimulating films at this year’s [Cannes] festival.

Cronenberg’s implicit self-portraiture is the film’s most personal, most visceral element. He makes his long-awaited return to the movies through the exit door.

It’s not exactly revolutionary, and more alarming than scary. But it’s still provocatively feverish stuff from the dearly missed vintage annals of Cronenberg.

Crimes of the Future isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s so relentlessly moribund, barely staggering through the half-formed narrative giving it structure.

Cryptically loquacious, with its notable cast intensely discussing theories of the troubled future they’re hurtling towards, it’s a slick return for Cronenberg, whose tortured visions have been missed.

This new movie feels more melancholic than many of the earlier ones... Yet despite the morbid laughs... “Crimes of the Future” feels like a requiem. Cronenberg has always been a diagnostician of the human condition; here, he also feels a lot like a mortician.

The words “return to form” will likely get thrown around a lot, but the veteran filmmaker never lost his chops or his way; he just began poking around in different corners, nudging his way into psychological spaces rather than batshit biological ones. It’s a return to “a” form... This is what the work of a visionary filmmaker looks like.

With “Crimes of the Future,” we’re left with a remove from the material, where no matter what happens, it’s all just performance art.

Shocks wear off, pain dulls, and people keep evolving. Cronenberg does too, and one of the best things about Crimes of the Future is that it makes it even more difficult to predict where he’ll be poking around next.

David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future is a stunning film: visually, emotionally, viscerally, and narratively. It is both hallucinatory and intensely real—an echo chamber of Cronenbergiana colliding with a city whose three-thousand-year history can be mined but never contained.

If all of the world-building here doesn’t always snap together as vigorously and perfectly as it has in Cronenberg’s best work, Crimes of the Future does still feel like a galvanizing reset that harkens back to the potent rush of his earliest feature film experiments...