What if the sex robots from Blade Runner had their own murder mystery a la... Mindhunter? The script doesn't seem to be that bad, good sound design, good costume and set design. I think the movie mostly suffers from bad cinematography that makes all the other hard work look like home video or student film and takes you out of it. There's some delicious overacting straight from the island of Dr. Moreau by one of the villains but overall the cast is doing a good job. Another weakness to me is the overuse of psycho POV video footage, although I guess that also belongs to cinematography and direction, but it feels a liitle too obsessed with killer perversion to the point of fetishizing. The movie could have been better focusing on the story of the girl wanting to be a machine and the moral dilemma of killing a human under the assumption of them being a machine, which seems to be at the core of the script, but gets lost in whodunnit torture porn.

It made me sad how bad this movie turned out. There were too many variables that needed to work to make this an ok movie, but everything just fell slightly short of being solid, despite good performances by Rudd and Theroux.

The first 20 minutes could have been told in two minutes and I almost gave up, then it got minimally engaging and I half dozed through the rest.
It was interesting to see Berlin dressed up in Blade Runner, but then again not interesting enough to make up for story.

The idea of having the main character be a mute required every other actor to be able to carry scenes, which not many were, especially considering that the bar for acting in sci-fi movies is already low. The writing is not very tight, neither the editing, the vfx are generic and the camera meanders through many scenes that seem to want to capture a futuristic Berlin culture but have no purpose driving the plot forward.
That said it could have been a good movie, maybe similar to Strange Days, if they had approached it like a Fincher thriller instead of a dreamy juvenile romance/revenge story. Oh, and sci-fi, there was no need for sci-fi at all, even considering the last sci-fi-esque surgery and it's consequence - no need. The last half hour had some decent themes and acting, maybe they should have taken that and rewritten the rest. Anyway this review sucks about as much as the movie. Go watch it if you want to learn from its mistakes.

smart people: they study at elite universities, are generally clumsy and naive when it comes to love. Luckily science has it that it's the right guy when he asks you for your middle name(make sure he went to Berkley first though). Christmas is a great wrapper for coming of age metaphors and learning family values, because that's what smart people struggle with. This movie can teach whoopsy daisy smartasses to grow up and meet cute.

Season 10: Was this written by a 14 year old? Everyone talks like cowboys in 1940ies detective stories performed by a high school poetry club. The dialogue is just there to summarize internet facts and replace actual plot. Characters are jumping to conclusions within seconds, finishing each others sentence or line of reasoning(feels like everyone is just speaking with the writers voice) and always seem like they're delivering ragtag presidential speeches in apocalypse movies. Even the seasoned actors can't bring life to this phone book adaptation.

This might be the dumbest movie I have ever seen. It's an insult to your intelligence even if you have an IQ at room temperature. We had twenty years to prepare and came up with this crap, we deserve to die.

[review not mine, copied from imdb as synopsis when I added the movie to listal] The four friends Bibiana, Claudio, Harald, and Tamara separated in 1992, but promised themselves to meet each other again on the 30th birthday of each of them, which takes place throughout the year 2000. So the film is basically divided into four sequences related to the four birthday parties, plus additional material cut between these four parts. While the plot proceeds, in principal, according to the timely order of the birthdays, the last birthday (Bibiana's) is presented as the first one, and that's where the "additional material" comes from: This birthday is the most complex one, because Bibiana has, as a young girl, decided for herself "never to get older than 30 years", and she has never ceased from this decision. At the same time, Tamara is far advanced in pregnancy, and so "birthday" is getting a new sense around this particular date. Though being pure fiction, the film follows a semi-documentary attitude by not only telling a story of four friends but also showing all of the protagonists in short interview-like situations cut between the story, where each of them takes the opportunity to explain his or her personal point of view of this long-lasting friendship, unbiased by the presence of the other friends. The film shows how real friendship can unite very different, and complicated, characters, who live four individual lives, but would never hesitate to stand up for their friend.

- Written by Claus Horn (summary from imdb)

After the tragic loss of her husband, a young woman reconstructs the circumstances which caused his death. During this attempt to find her own way in daily life again, more and more recollections and occurrences appear on the surface, seemingly to foresee a tragic end. Looking back, events appear to her like signs, chance meetings like disregarded warnings. On her search for meaning between yesterday and tomorrow, reality seems to split like a labyrinth, like an awakening after a nightmare, with no way out.

this movie is pretentious crap. it's filled to the brim with clichés and pseudo-romantic voice overs which are only a pretext to show as much tits and pussies as any teenage boy can possibly imagine. it also doesn't help to throw in some seemingly innovative visual gimmicks to elevate it into the artsy realms of a gondry or jonze movie, because they're out of place, serve no purpose storywise and are mere empty style. Tits and pussies are great to look at but why pretend to be an artist for it to be acceptable and why tap a teenage mind for gag reflex triggering poetry and timefreezing fantasies to fill in as foreplay to tits and pussies? If I were a filmmaker I would probably find many good reasons to film pretty chicks naked, but I would try not to mentally cum all over my audience.

Some pretty bad but mostly mediocre acting, very bad digital video effects(lots of extreme radial blurs and blue tints just out of the blue), ridiculous dialogue and inconsistent plot logic but still able to hold your attention because of an unusual setting, decent set design and some rather good visuals thrown in once in a while. Not a good movie, but has some entertaining value. I had seen the chronicles of riddick some time ago and was interested to see where this character came from, but I didn't see any important backstory here. Watch at your own peril - or he will tell you "didn't know who you was f#*kin with".

only 5 stars because I was definitely offended, which almost never happens. I don't like horror movies for their display of violence as a turn on. Here the violence might be metaphorical in some twisted intellectual reasoning, but it's first and foremost senseless horrific gore that no metaphorical gain can justify. Still think Claire Denis is a great director, maybe morally challenged though.