The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (21) | Top Critics (4) | Fresh (21) | Rotten (0) | DVD (2)
A resounding commercial flop, this has since been recognized as a signature 60s film, prescient in its view of American self-deception.
A largely loony but oddly compulsive allegory.
As do few movies, The Swimmer stays in the memory like an echo that never quite disappears.
Burt Lancaster is superb in his finest performance.
A woefully forgotten gem from the 1960s ... a penetrating piece of introspection that was clearly ahead of its time.
As effectively as almost any movie ever made about American suburbia, The Swimmer gets the contentment that comes with material success[...] And it gets how the fantasy is hard to sustain.
Beautifully shot and executed, the effort is generous with disturbing, puzzling behavior, yet wise enough to provide clear clues to aid interpretation.
Frequently silly but oddly memorable and unsettling.
Ned Merrill is a tragic hero for the '60s, and it's one of Lancaster's most searing performances.
An enigmatic, poetic, disturbing, interestingly pretentious fable.
A mannerist, moody and wonderfully strange allegory of the squandered American Dream. Like a plunge into the deep end, it stings and refreshes.
Like a series of hammer-blows to the gut.
A buff Burt Lancaster is nearly naked the whole film as a upscale businessman swimming through the pools of his neighbors in a circuitous route home one evening. I wouldn't watch this for years as I took it merely as a Lancaster vanity project, but now I guess I'm old enough to see that that actually plays an important part in the story, his vanity, undercutting what is seen versus what is real. There's a Twilight Zone twist telegraphed throughout, but nonetheless its a cool piece about the difference between who we think we are and who we are in fact.
Super Reviewer
Observing that all his neighbors have swimming pools, an indefatigably cheerful man out for a morning jog decides to "swim" his way home; at each stop he talks to a new neighbor, slowly painting a picture of his life. Based on a John Cheever short story, this odd concept works surprisingly well as both a suburban satire and (thanks to an excellent performance by Burt Lancaster) a touching character study of a man who doesn't realize the American dream has passed him by.
A magnetic parable that pulverizes the american dream. Burt Lancaster plays a character engulfed by existential grief, trying to reach his own paradise lost. He decides that his burden will end when he swims his way home through every of his neighbors' pools, finding fragments and glimpses of his obscure past. Though a bit dated, it certainly has a huge space of inner meditation and also gives a hard and well-aimed blow to american society the way 'American Beauty' did some decades later. It also anticipated the arrival of 70s cinema and its complex and disenchanting themes. Lancaster's performance stands out, as well as the final scene.
The Swimmer rules. God bless Connecticut and Fairfield County.
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