Average Rating: 4.5/10
Reviews Counted: 93
Fresh: 33 | Rotten: 60
Southland Tales, while offering an intriguing vision of the future, remains frustratingly incoherent and unpolished.
Average Rating: 4.5/10
Critic Reviews: 23
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 14
Southland Tales, while offering an intriguing vision of the future, remains frustratingly incoherent and unpolished.
liked it
Average Rating: 2.8/5
User Ratings: 25,323
California is at the epicenter of a political and environmental disaster that threatens to destroy the world in this ambitious fusion of comedy, drama, dystopian science fiction, and music from writer and director Richard Kelly, his first film after gaining a cult following with Donnie Darko. In the year 2005, a nuclear attack wipes out part of the state of Texas, and three years later America is a virtual police state, with the government taking control of nearly every part of people's lives,
R, 2 hr. 24 min.
Musical & Performing Arts, Mystery & Suspense, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Comedy
Sep 22, 2007 Wide
Mar 18, 2008
$0.2M
Samuel Goldwyn Films
All Critics (93) | Top Critics (23) | Fresh (38) | Rotten (62) | DVD (10)
Richard Kelly's 'Southland Tales' Looms as rude, Confrontational Political Black Comedy about a Very Messed-Up, Dystrophian America - a Film with the Vigor and Incorrigible Quality of a Work-In-Progress.
One of the most confusing, ridiculous, pretentious and disastrous cinematic train wrecks I've ever seen.
By the time the movie rolls into its third hour, it's exhausted most of its comic energy, leaving you disoriented and unable to remember much of what you just saw.
Immature, crude, poorly made and a waste of time.
No amount of reworking could salvage what was a misbegotten and unfunny idea to begin with.
You can't be both political and incoherent.
Not much improvement over the vfirst, severely flawed version.
The brilliance of Southland Tales is inextricable from its flaws, if indeed they are flaws.
Has the galvanic pulse of a filmmaker trying things out, failing, and trying again
It's the sort of experience you feel embarrassed about even though you had nothing to do with it, because it's not just a mess, it's a pretentious mess
Extras on the Blu-ray disc include a full length audio commentary by writer/director Richard Kelly and a 'prequel' graphic novel gallery.
This is not just another hodgepodge of a movie that's all noise and excess; writer/ director Richard Kelly has a point here; he has plenty to say.
The type of incoherent, indulgent muddle that can only emerge from the mind of someone who is quite talented.
I'll give it this: Southland Tales is never boring.
entirely misdirected, and the film never gels or even makes sense
Although it's by any reasonable means a flawed film, Southland Tales demands watching, if only for its cinematic achievements.
Sets up such a pretense of intellectualism it fools its audience into believing it's on a plain they can't understand...
A subversive and annihilistic satire on America, lurching from black comedy to farce, from dramatic insight to superficial jokes
Moment to moment, the film makes a random kind of sense, but after about 30 minutes of this, it's clear that the author has no clue how it's all supposed to go together.
It's that rare kind of film that some will love and many will hate for the EXACT same reason.
When it's not being obstinately stupid, Southland Tales is just difficult to watch.
Southland Tales might best be approached as poetry in enervated motion.
A [cool] futuristic ensemble scifi dramedy with a musical twist.
Teen horniness is not a crime but Southland Tales is.
This movie tried to say so much and i think in the end it brought the whole movie to a crashing halt. Good idea by a young director with a good future.
May 6, 2008Super Reviewer
A strange film set in the future with a confusing plot with deals with alternative energy, politics, world war 3 and the 4th dimension!! A bit long it has some good moments but a few lows as well. Overall just a bit odd.
June 17, 2007Super Reviewer
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