We will update this post as the reviews pour in. We'll excerpt the Rob bits and Cosmopolis praise but click the links to read the entire reviews.
Excerpt from Filmoria. They gave the film 5 out of 5 stars and LOVED Rob:
But the film’s true driving force (excuse the pun) is Pattinson’s utterly fearless, audacious and sizzling performance. Both Twilight stars have now had films here in Cannes and both Kristen Stewart and Pattinson have given some of the festival’s strongest roles. Packer is a multi-layered, cynical, and chillingly captivating character; he’s a gritty brush-stroke of our modern day society, a itching rash that demands attending to. The world in which Packer resides in is one of disgusting wealth and luxury yet crippling doubt, paranoia, and self-loathing. Pattinson’s darkly comic and distressingly real performance here embodies everything Cosmopolis desires to express; he whispers and scuttles but his manners and aura leave a deafening echo hanging in the tainted, dystopian atmosphere.
Cronenberg’s latest will not be for everyone – it’s a slinky, scabby and repressed black dramedy that’s unobliging and unconventional – I’m sure some ‘Twihards’ will enter upon release simply for R-Patz and leave the cinema feeling either bored, bruised or baffled, but for those who enjoy challenging, alternative and uncompromising pictures, Cosmopolis is your drink of choice.
"Steely-eyed" Pattinson in the Global Gazette ; Rob does well with the material from Film School Rejects; "Pattinson holds his own" from Indiewire; Rob is "more than a perfectly-chiseled face" from Movie City News; Not really a review because it came from David but LA Times has him quoted talking about Rob's performance: "The essence of cinema is a fantastic face saying fantastic words."; "Robert Pattinson deliver, perhaps his best performance to date as Eric Packer" from Ion Cinema;
Alt Film Guide did some translations of french reviews. A few of them:
Via Paris-Match: "Screened for the press at 8:30 this morning, David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis seems to have divided the critics. Considered too talky by some, among them our critic Alain Spira, this implacable observation of the inhumanity of the world’s new masters can be seen as a nightmarish sequel to David Fincher’s The Social Network. Robert Pattinson is flawless as Eric Packer, disillusioned and cynical to perfection."Excerpt from Entertainment Weekly:
Caroline Vié at 20minutes.fr: "[In Cosmopolis,] David Cronenberg displays his dark sense of humor as well as his filmmaking genius, for the film was almost entirely shot in a limousine. He perfectly illustrates the chaos surrounding this peaceful haven, as well as the inner storm brewing inside his hero. Throughout it all, Robert Pattinson confirms that he has a career after Twilight. A disturbing 21st-century Rastignac, he carries the film on his shoulders while surrounded by carefully selected supporting actors." [Eugène de Rastignac = Honoré de Balzac's ambitious, cunning character in Balzac's La Comédie Humaine narratives.]
Olivier Delcroix in Le Figaro: "From Cosmopolis‘ first images, it becomes crystal clear: David Cronenberg will be giving us the best of his art.
Robert Pattinson, pale and predatory even without his pasty-white vampire makeup, delivers his frigid pensées with rhythmic confidence, but he’s not playing a character, he’s playing an abstraction — the gazillionaire bad-boy hotshot who flies too close to the sun, but he likes it up there, so f— you! In the last act, he finally has a meeting with a man he can’t control, the one who may be trying to kill him — played, with the only semblance of human spontaneity in the movie, by Paul Giamatti.Excerpt from Ain't It Cool. They were fascinated. :)
There’s something off about the movie. It was distracting at first… the cadence of the dialogue, the theatricality of the writing, the way Cronenberg seemed to get right in Robert Pattinson’s face with the camera.Excerpt from Variety:
Check out this clip… it’s from about the middle of the movie when Pattinson’s character, Eric Packer, a Mark Zuckerberg “young and rich genius” type stops to eat with his wife… a woman who he’s never had sex with, apparently, and it’s driving him crazy. I place it here in this review so you can get an understanding of what I mean when I say there’s something (intentionally) off about this film.
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The real trick of this one lies in Robert Pattinson’s portrayal of Eric Packer. This is a guy that has everything and anything bad that happens to him is invited in… kind of a difficult character to empathize with. He’s cold, he talks nonstop about money markets and philosophy, he fucks and eats so much you’d think he was Dionysus reborn.
And when you consider the journey of the film is to get a haircut, you start to get a picture of just how difficult a role this was for Pattinson.
I may not be a fan of Twilight, but I don’t hold that against Pattinson, especially if he’s going to use his starpower to do brave work like Cosmopolis. I wouldn’t say he comes alive here, that’s not the character, but he makes an unlikable character likable. You may not be able to relate to this man, but there’s just enough of a human being underneath the excess, psychosis and self-destructive behavior to keep him from being completely detestable.
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Cosmopolis has a lot on its mind and it’s difficult to process after just one viewing. This wasn’t a film I left the theater in love with… it was one I had to mull over. I explored my feelings on this film while writing this review more than I typically do. The more distance I get from the movie, the more I like it. I’ve talked with a few people who didn’t like it much and I understand that. Cronenberg doesn’t flinch from going whole-hog into an offbeat story, not caring if he alienates some of his audience along the way.
For Cronenberg fans his fingerprints are all over the movie… not nearly enough (read: any) new flesh for my taste, but there’s a dark sense of humor that underlines the film.
Love it or hate it, it’s a fascinating movie, a different kind of experience than you usually expect at the cinema.
An eerily precise match of filmmaker and material, "Cosmopolis" probes the soullessness of the 1% with the cinematic equivalent of latex gloves. Applying his icy intelligence to Don DeLillo's prescient 2003 novel, David Cronenberg turns a young Wall Street titan's daylong limo ride into a coolly corrosive allegory for an era of technological dependency, financial failure and pervasive paranoia, though the dialogue-heavy manner in which it engages these concepts remains distancing and somewhat impenetrable by design. While commercial reach will be limited to the more adventurous end of the specialty market, Robert Pattinson's excellent performance reps an indispensable asset.
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Charges that this study in emptiness and alienation itself feels empty and alienating are at once accurate and a bit beside the point, and perhaps the clearest confirmation that Cronenberg has done justice to his subject. In presenting such a close-up view of Eric's inner sanctum, the film invites the viewer's scorn and fascination simultaneously; to that end, the helmer has an ideal collaborator in Pattinson, whose callow yet charismatic features take on a seductively reptilian quality here. It's the actor's strongest screen performance and certainly his most substantial.
Excerpt from HitFix. They gave Cosmopolis a B- and there isn't much said about Rob so much as a dive into Eric Packer. They do say Rob had compelling screen presence:
What’s most surprising is it’s the scenes within Packer’s limo (notably a febrile sex scene between Pattinson and a luminously cameoing Juliette Binoche) that are tautest and most flammable. When the film ventures out onto the street, the energy – or, if not energy, the effectively slippery equivalent inherent in Pattinson’s compelling screen presence – dissipates. Longtime Cronenberg loyalist Peter Suchitzky’s camera certainly responds best to claustrophia, invasive too-close-ups and just-too-high angles lending the whole film the sense of a security surveillance tape from purgatory, matters made no less disconcerting by the compressed silent yawns of the sound design and the hovering insinuations of Howard Shore’s spare electro-influenced score, all of which recall smaller, nastier works from the director dating all the way back to “Stereo.” Even when we can’t quite decipher its message, there’s a hint of the didactic about “Cosmopolis” that speaks to its late place in the director’s canon; its emptily chaotic environment, however, is classic Cronenbergia creation, as invigoratingly and reassuringly strange as can be.Full review from e-go.gr translated for us by unpetitpeuK. She said the critic is a reputable film critic in Greece and had a review definitely worth sharing. Thank you!
"Robert Pattinson shines in the new Cronenberg film"Excerpt form Twitch Film:
David Cronenberg tackles the hottest topic of this era and stars the hottest movie star. "Cosmopolis" is an ironic and poignant glimpse onto the structures of capitalism and criticizes in a daring way the financial crisis. It could certainly be much hotter than it is after all. It could also be more "cinematic", meaning that it could leave aside the more verbalistic approach and use more film solutions. For the times when it does, when the” essay” becomes pure cinema, the film takes off.
Robert Pattinson is amazing – he shines through the costume of a weird and grotesque role, he embodies difficult philosophical and political ideas, and he becomes an excellent vehicle for analyzing and understanding them.
The central character (Pattinson) is a millionaire who moves through New York in a luxurious limousine. He meets diverse people , has makes rampant sex with Juliette Binoche, tries to win the love of his wife, who he has just married by interest, and unnecessarily shoots his bodyguard on the head.
And mostly talks. He talks incessantly. It is one of the few times in a movie where the protagonist appears virtually in every shot of the film. He is present in all the details, balancing between delirium and political philosophy.
Cronenberg borrows from his masterpiece, «Crash» (1996), and his latest film, "A Dangerous Method ': ie analyzes eccentric situations (in this case the financial system and the structures of capitalism) using methods of psychoanalysis . The main hero - because everyone else are just his satellites - is a man unsympathetic, but who utters some of the most bold truths that can currently be heard.
The man who ultimately impresses is Pattinson. Apparently lost and not knowing exactly what his is playing, he managed to survive in a cinematic chaos of ideas and amazing pictures, and shine. Speaking earlier to reporters, he did not hesitate to say that he has no idea what is the character that he plays and did not understand what the movie really talks about. "Maybe," he said, "he is someone who was born in the wrong reality."
Impression, however, caused the role of Sarah Gadon, whom we saw five days before, in the film «Antiviral», by Cronenberg' s son, Brandon. Besides the fact that the son imitated the cinematic style of his father (his film, however, had an interesting tone), they also shared the same actor.
In some cases the "Cosmopolis" reminded me of the last efforts of Wenders: cinema of big intentions, full of brilliant ideas, but ultimately not completed, and barely meets the level of difficulties of the scenario in order to become a movie. Cronenberg certainly remains one of the greatest filmmakers of our time. His artistic vision goes beyond the frame, while his ideas are always original and shocking.
~Orestis Andreadakis
Give David Cronenberg credit for one thing: His choice to cast Robert Pattinson was an inspired and brilliant decision. While Cosmopolis is a bit too one-note to allow any proclamations about Pattinson's range, his opaque, handsome, sometimes robot-like face compliments Cronenberg's themes and styles perfectly. In terms of what the director seems to be aiming for here, his cold performance is nearly flawless.
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Leos Carax's Holy Motors is still much more fun, but Cronenberg has still made an odd, uncompromising and occasionally brilliant film of his own, one which is well worth seeing, if only for the deft way the Cronenberg finds an emotional arc in such an inhumane world. Or else to see how perfectly Pattinson's performance suits the director.
MORE reviews after the cut!
Digital Spy wasn't impressed but did call the film a step up for Rob:
Water for Elephants and Bel Ami proved Pattinson is chasing darker roles and this is a bold step up. There's a nihilistic sarcasm about his performance that's nicely judged and you can feel Cronenberg channelling his vampiric blankness. But most of Cronenberg's movie boils down to dense, difficult monologues about capitalism - lifted uneasily from Don DeLillo's novel - by a string of cameo stars. Juliette Binoche bounces around on Pattison, Samantha Morton talks time and money, Mathieu Amalric pops up as a pie-chucking protestor.
The Film Stage gives Cosmopolis a C+ but had this to say about Rob:
Featuring an ensemble cast built on quick cameos, the film is anchored by a solid, ennui-filled performance by Robert Pattinson, shedding his Twilight skin for something more substantive and reminiscent of Christian Bale in American Pyscho.The Playlist LOVED Cosmopolis. I'm stunned. Seriously. It's not from that one guy though. *sneers* They give the film an A and constantly reference "Pattinson's Packer". They call Rob "a surprisingly adequate Robert Pattinson" but when you're so bitter about the role that made him famous, you would be surprised that Rob's quite talented.
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Sarah Gadon (who also starred in his Brandon Cronenberg’s Un Certain Regard film Antiviral) plays Parker’s wife Elise with a similarly eerie detached quality as Pattinson and is one of the few characters to have any kind of real arc.
It’s pretty funny to see Pattinson, being the young, pretty tabula rasa that he is, play Packer, a wheeler-dealer that used to be hot shit but is now unable to sleep because he fears that he’s no longer relevant.See what I mean? They can't help themselves. Even with a glowing review LOL Click HERE to read. It's not easy to excerpt because the author is very expressive with their love for the film. A final note. They call Cosmopolis "An Excellent Adaptation & A Rich, Complex Character Study"and conclude on this:
Everything matters in Cronenberg’s "Cosmopolis," but not everything is necessarily the same as DeLillo’s book. And that makes the film, as a series of discussions about inter-related money-minded contradictions, insanely rich and maddeningly complex. We can’t wait to rewatch it.
Excerpt from Time Out. They give Cosmopolis 3 out of 5 stars but it's still a decent review. Especially for our guy. :)
'Cosmopolis' is an odyssey defined by a series of one-on-one encounters. There are prostate examinations, stripped bodies, sex, conversations about Rothko and souped-up chats on subjects such as the philosophies of financial security systems and how time is a corporate asset. Much of the talk makes no obvious sense: 'Cosmopolis' has the air of an experimental theatre piece and trades in heightened, eroticised language. You could say it tries to turn the mind of Packer inside-out: to make the psychological real. That's tougher on film, surely, than in print, and 'Cosmopolis' is at its best when it's otherworldly and aching with artifice. It's at its worst when it becomes weighed down by an excessive, wearying wordiness, or when it steps out of the limo – the film's self-imposed arena of surreality – and into a place more like the real world. 'Cosmopolis' threatens to soar and to be important, but it only offers flashes of lucidity; the limo is a mesmerising bubble that is quickly burst when the film steps outside it.
That said, there's a consistent air of charged, end-of-days menace running through the film, which Cronenberg handles with an unbroken sense of precision and confidence. He's well-served, too, by a leering, disintegrating Pattinson, giving a commanding, sympathetic portrait of a man being consumed by his own vanity and power.
I wanted to stay away from these today but a French review gave Cosmopolis a 5 out of 5 stars. Said Rob gave an amazing performance and unexpected (not to us) dimension. Click HERE to read for french speakers. Oh and if I got that wrong, blame google and my high school french teacher. The stars are right though. I learned how to count at a young age. ;) Le Figaro also praises the film HERE.
Excerpt from Screen Daily. Mediocre but Rob isn't attacked. I also edited it because the guy can't spell Rob's last name correctly.:
Bankable Twilight saga star Robert Pattinson is fine in the main part: if his Eric Packer is a little cold, a touch robotic, then so is Cronenberg’s unapologetically stylised approach to the story; this was never going to be a role that called for big emotions. But it’s difficult to see Pattinson’s youth appeal skewing this arthouse product’s audience towards the teen market – it’s just too slow and too talky.
Excerpt from MSN giving Cosmopolis a 4/5:
It's not the first time DeLillo has had his work on-screen, and it's not the first time that Cronenberg has tackled a supposedly unfilmable novel. But there's a satisfying synergy in the meshing of their themes and topics and means and methods, as Eric obsesses about getting to his favorite barber and about what's happening to the global currency markets as his speculation on the rising Chinese Yuan is about to wipe out his fortune and his company.Excerpt from Little White Lies:
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The dialogue is rapid-fire, so much so that it leaves bullet holes. And as Eric goes across town in his ridiculous car -- with the world coming to him in the form of business meetings, sexual liaisons and even doctor's appointments in the back of the limo -- we realize that Eric is the epitome of modern capitalism. The titans who make our world are small, broken people. And, interestingly enough, if you're casting for a dead-eyed shark wreathed in unearned privilege, Pattinson turns out to be a pretty good choice.
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There are other cast members who do an excellent idea of wrapping their heads around DeLillo's big ideas and Cronenberg's indirect dialogue -- Juliette Binoche and Samantha Morton, Mathieu Almaric and Paul Giamatti -- and the music, by Metric, supplies the right kind of spiky, sensuous unease for a man driven across town and driven to self-destruction. The film's cynicism is both majestic and well-earned; at one point, Eric notes "… nobody hates the rich ,,, everybody thinks they're ten seconds away from being rich." A chilly, crisp and crystal-shard sharp satire of our money-crazed world, "Cosmopolis" takes us on a limo ride through the collapse of modern society: We're not behind the wheel for this ride, but rest assured, in the end, we're going to have to get out and pay for it.
David Cronenberg’s superb latest is an existential road movie for our financially and morally bankrupt times, interested as much in addressing the semantic minutiae of the corporate apocalypse as it is deep felt anxieties relating to stress, success, control and our inability ward off death with money and status.Excerpt from Empire Online:
Like The Social Network, it combines a credible depiction of a person whose age and intellect are dangerously off kilter, while sending its “hero” on an anti-capitalist nightmare odyssey that discharges all the dry cynicism and insouciant doomsaying of Godard’s Week End.
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Robert Pattinson is magnetic as Eric Packer, slick, jaded 26-year-old CEO of Packer Capital who decides to take a fleet of Limousines across across New York City in search of a haircut. This is his best performance to date by some considerable margin. Yes, even better than Remember Me.
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It’s a richly verbose film, even more so than his majestic, 2011 exploration of extreme emotional repression, A Dangerous Method. It gets to the point where much of what is spoken cannot be fathomed – “talent is more erotic when it’s wasted” – but the film is about the rhythms of dialogue, the verbal posturing, sparring and deceptions employed in the economic sector. The way in which Cronenberg photographs the talk, too, is subtle, elegant and intense without ever drawing undue attention to itself or feeling overly oppressive. Per Cronenberg himself, this is a film in which “fantastic faces say fantastic words”.
For Robert Pattinson, however, this is another league, and his celebrity status certainly suits the part. He plays Eric Packer, son of a super-rich businessman, a society kid who has made his fortune with mysterious dotcoms and by playing the money markets. Today he is betting against the baht and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. The inside of the limo glows with LED screens, and Eric is joined by a roundelay of guest stars (including a very slinky Juliette Binoche and, more surprisingly, an edgy Samantha Morton) who engage him in bizarre, solipsistic conversations. These talks border on self-parody but somehow they work. It reminded me of Roy Andersson's wonderful Songs From The Second Floor, since this is what the end of the world probably would sound like. Though the budget is clearly quite low, Cronenberg does convincingly convey a sense of apocalyptic doom, from his characters' psychotic babble (at one point Eric is attacked by the custard-pie wielding Pastry Assassin) to a full-on riot that covers the pristine car in spraypaint and anti-capitalist graffiti.Reviews I don't give a sh*t about go on the bottom. The Hollywood Reporter didn't have one good thing to say. But honestly, I think they are preconditioned to hate all Rob's movies so...*shrug* their loss.
The stylised nature of the language will limit this film's appeal, and its self-conscious craziness might also be testing to some (why does the professional barber Eric finally visits cut huge steps in his hair?). And after Water For Elephants it remains to be seen whether Pattinson's teen following really is willing to follow him anywhere. But Cosmopolis does prove that he has the chops, and he parlays his cult persona beautifully into the spoiled, demanding Packer, a man so controlling and ruthless that only he has the power to ruin himself. Lean and spiky – with his clean white shirt he resembles a groomed Sid Vicious – Pattinson nails a difficult part almost perfectly, recalling those great words of advice from West Side Story: You wanna live in this crazy world? Play it cool.
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