No Reviews
Top Critic"No" is a picture that perches precariously on the cusp of a paradox.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A cunning and richly enjoyable combination of high-stakes drama and media satire from Chilean director Pablo Larrain.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A mesmerizing, realistic and often hilarious look at the politics of power and the power of ideas ...
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A political drama, a personal drama, a sharp-eyed study of how the media manipulate us from all sides, No reels and ricochets with emotional force.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a funny look at the way the media warp public opinion, and a curiously hopeful one.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
On every level, "No" leaves one with bittersweet feelings about democracy, love and the cost of compromise.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
If you can shake off the inherent grossness of mining the Pinochet years for yet another Mad Man-style deification of zeitgeist-grasping salesmen, this is moderately interesting stuff.
If there are fewer white-knuckle showdowns than in a Hollywood movie, the trade-off is a cool, ironic intelligence that ripples off the screen and up the years to where we live.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
"No" stands proudly in a select sub-category of historical fiction films that work, completely and satisfyingly, as their own movies.
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| Original Score: 4/4
García Bernal quietly carries this film as a soft-spoken kid in blue jeans and untucked shirt.
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| Original Score: 4/4
"No" isn't nearly as definitive or declarative as its title: It leaves viewers wondering whether they should cheer, shrug or shake their heads.
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| Original Score: 3/4
There will have to be a hell of a lot of good movies released in 2013 for No not to make my list of the year's 10 best.
It always retains a level of interest, especially for those of us who don't remember - or aren't old enough to remember - which side won.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Nominated by the Academy as the year's best foreign-language film, No grabs you hard, no mercy, and keeps you riveted.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Larraín's unarguable point is that, in politics, if we wait for good to issue only from the pure in heart, we will be waiting a very long time.
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| Original Score: B
[Lorrain has] made a few daring choices here, not all of which work.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A troubling, exhilarating and ingeniously realized film that's part stirring political drama and part devilish media satire ...
It's a perfectly fine movie, but given its fairly radical storyline, the filmmaking tends to hew toward the safe and the familiar.
For anyone fascinated by the political process and the powers of persuasive advertising, No is a resounding yes.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The story of it, while true to the moment, needed - ironically - much more dynamism.
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| Original Score: 2/5
"No" signals a huge spurt in the filmmaker's growth.
'No' is never a drag to watch, but paradoxically enough, its self-imposed cinematic restraints inhibit it from selling itself as effectively as it might have.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Largely a gimmick picture: At all times, it looks like hastily assembled news footage shot on grainy videotape in 1988.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Explores the power of popular dissent, and the coordinated persuasions of media, marketing, and targeted advertising in shaping the word no to invigorate a populace pessimistically conditioned to think that nothing will ever change for the good.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Deftly appropriates mediated history for fiction.
Tense throughout, even for history-savvy auds, but still rich in the sort of Andean-soil-black humor that made Larrain's previous work so distinctive.
"No" is an ugly looking movie - literally - for an ugly time. It's smeary, with little pictorial beauty or detail, but its anti-aesthetic is purposeful and, after your eyes stop hurting, watchable and persuasive.
The standout entry of the Directors' Fortnight sidebar and the closest thing to a masterpiece that I've seen so far here in Cannes.
A decisive transitional chapter in Chilean history yields an absorbing account of one country's unlikely route from oppression to democracy
