The Neon Demon

An audio-visual feast with fantastic acting performances (an excellent Desmond Harrington). The inner storyline is quite interesting, but overall the story lacks dynamism. As always, Winding Refn is in no hurry, but unfortunately the world of modeling offers no excuse for action, which occasionally helped Drive forward a little (also in places in Only God Forgives), the lesson is fairly simple, bizarre, but still clear, but it’s difficult to sum up the entire movie in a single intellectual exercise about the significance of individual scenes. The main problem, apart from the traditional remoteness, was the length. And so you must see the movie if only for the corpse licker and the visually refined composition of images. You’ll have to battle against viewer fatigue, because the Neon Demon has no soul. (2016-09-24)

Pubertal provocation. Refn was able to show the depth of the surface in such a way that a similar emptied mess full of dull script clichés could hardly upset a person. In addition, NRW directs poorly this time. Wooden dialogues, clip sequences that every little talented advertising director can handle, whilst the great Elle and Cliff Martinez's electro-arpeggio take care of all the dynamics. I was expecting hypnosis, but this is a sedative. [Cannes 2016] (2016-05-20)

It's as terribly empty, resigned, and exhausted as you would expect from the brief. Once again it's a photo-novel, once again everything there merely serves the purpose of setting the scene, only unlike the previous Only God Forgives, this one is still horribly unoriginal. A thousand well-worn allusions to the lifelessness of top modeling only generate pretty shots without context and such a desperately effort at controversy that I winced even when Jena Malone was getting it on with a corpse. Think! And it’s a pity, because I want to watch an android in makeup vomit up an eyeball. Because Refn should take a cue from Drive and work on planting his style in a genre world where both can blossom and enrich each other. As it is, he'll only get derisive giggles from the cinema during the stilted dialogue and unsuccessful, overwrought spiritualism. How aptly the film is described by a scene in which an artificial model, remade with thousands of operations, proudly boasts that her plastic surgeon calls her the "bionic woman", whereupon she receives the disgusted response "And that's supposed to be a compliment?" (2016-09-23)

The protagonist moves to Los Angels to start a modeling career and, as everyone is impressed by her natural beauty, her career grows at a tremendous rate, which some of her competitors can not tolerate. The film has a slower pace, not much talking and there are some very long takes, but it's a fantastic cinematography and audiovisual experience. It’s horror maybe in the last 15 minutes or so, the rest is more of a hypnotic and audiovisual drama, but it has a lot going for it. PS: I didn't like the main character. 60% (2016-09-06)

After I watched this movie, I’ve got the feeling that Nicolas Winding Refn is drowning in his own filmmaking utopias. I get that the Neon Demon has a clear premise about modelling, but I don’t get the artistic pathos they’re using to get to the point. Sure, many of the scenes are very interesting and very pleasing to the eye, but as a whole, I feel like the movie’s just a concurrence of different scenes that don’t make much sense. The director’s lucky that he can choose the right music to his video. I fell for it with Drive, but it was a bit harder this time. (2016-11-22)