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‘Fall’ Review: A Don’t-Look-Down Thriller That Will Have You Clutching Your Seat

Two women climb an abandoned TV tower in the desert, and we're with them every shivery step.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“ Fall ” is a very good “don’t look down” movie. It’s a fun, occasionally cheesy, but mostly ingeniously made thriller about two daredevil climbers, Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Hunter (Virginia Gardner), who decide to scale the B67 TV tower — an abandoned 2,000-foot communication tower that juts up in the middle of the California desert. It’s based on an actual structure (the KXTV/KOVR Tower outside Sacramento), which is used like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the skyscraper that became the pedestal for Tom Cruise’s you-are-there stunt sequences in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.” And if, like me, you loved that movie in part because of how deviously it toyed with your fear of heights, “Fall” is likely to hit you as an irresistible piece of vertigo porn. It’s for anyone who ate up “Ghost Protocol,” as well as the awesome rock-climbing documentaries “Free Solo” and “The Dawn Wall,” and wants to continue that shivery vicarious high.

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Critics, for some reason, now like to mock the visual sleight-of-hand that goes into a thriller like this one, as if the CGI involved were all too easy to see through. But in this case I couldn’t disagree more. “Fall” was shot in the Imax format in the Mojave Desert, and there are moments when I honestly don’t know how the director, Scott Mann , the cinematographer, MacGregor, and the two actors did it. Were they actually on a tower — and, if so, how high up? Were there stunt people, or was every bit of this brought off with computer trickery?

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The abandoned TV tower, like the KXTV/KOVR Tower, is, we’re told, the fourth highest structure in the U.S. It has a photogenic vermilion finish (imagine the Golden Gate Bridge as a rusty hypodermic needle), and it turns out to be the perfect setting for a movie about climbing into the sky. As the two women ascend, the desert below looks like something viewed from an airplane. The trick is that the elements of the image are all visually united: tower, horizon, climbers. Without a cut, the film will glide from close-ups to vertically angled drops to death-defying panoramas; the light and shadow are always just right. You know how it feels when you watch an old movie with rear projection that’s laughably fake? “Fall,” by contrast, represents a totally credible and innovative use of CGI. Watching the movie, we believe our eyes and, therefore, our raised pulses.

The two women have agreed to make this climb as a way to wrest Becky out of her funk. In the film’s opening sequence, we see the two ascending a vertical rock face along with Becky’s husband, Dan (Mason Gooding), who winds up plunging to his death. A year passes, and Becky can’t let go — of him, or of the anxiety that has calcified around the tragedy. Facing her fear, scaling that TV tower along with her best friend (they plan to scatter Dan’s ashes when they get to the top), is the only thing that will purge the demon.

As terrifyingly tall as the tower is, it doesn’t strike us as something that would offer that much of a challenge to highly experienced climbers. There’s a ladder on the inside of the caged needle that goes up for 1,800 feet. For the remaining 200 feet, the ladder is outside the structure. I wouldn’t want to climb 30 feet of it, but these two aren’t scared of heights, and the feat they’ve laid out for themselves looks a hell of a lot easier than shimmying over the smooth plunging rock faces they’re used to. That’s why they succeed pretty quickly. Half an hour into the movie, they’ve ascended to the small circular platform up top.

But along the way the whole structure has been quivering, with telltale shots of a nut or a bolt coming undone here and there. It’s the outside ladder that’s getting loose, and as they take the last steps, a chunk of it falls out from under them, the weight of that chunk pulling the rest of the ladder down with it. Just like that, they’re stranded. The cylindrical pole that’s left is too smooth to climb down. The rope they have isn’t long enough. And though they’ve got their phones, they’re up too high to get service. There is nothing up there but the two of them and their do-or-die ingenuity.

At the start of the movie, Hunter is all giddy enthusiasm, like a Reese Witherspoon go-getter from the ’90s, and Becky, lost in her malaise, is all po-faced misery and dread. But the two actors show you how these women come alive, and connect, by climbing. It’s through their expressive skill that we believe in what we’re seeing. “Fall” was made for just $3 million, and it’s good enough to remind me of another perilous small-scale thriller centered on two people doing all they can to survive: “Open Water,” the scary 2003 indie that basically extended the opening sequence of “Jaws” over 80 minutes. Movies like these come with built-in narrative devices — like, for instance, the soap-opera revelation that comes up between Becky and Hunter. There are moments when the script overdoes the millennial effrontery, especially when it’s focused on Hunter’s identity as a YouTuber who wants to document the whole climb for her 60,000 followers (“This bad boy is over 2,000 feet tall, and your homegirls are going to be climbing to the tippy tippy top!”).

Mostly, though, we’re with these two, living through every vulture attack and sudden drop that involves something like hanging from a rope and trying to grab a stranded backpack. Is there a pedestrian below who could save them? The movie deals with that possibility in a way that recalls the Robert Redford-stranded-at-sea movie “All Is Lost.” “Fall” is a technical feat of a thriller, yet it’s not without a human center. It earns your clenched gut and your white knuckles.

Reviewed online, Aug. 9, 2022. MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 107 MIN.

• Production: A Lionsgate release of a Tea Shop Production, Capstone Studios, Grindstone Entertainment Group production, in association with Flawless, Cousin Jones. Producers: David Haring, James Harris, Mark Lane, Scott Mann, Christian Mercuri. Executive producer: Roman Viaris, Barry Brooker, John Long, Dan Asma.
• Crew: Director: Scott Mann. Screenplay: Jonathan Frank, Scott Mann. Camera: MacGregor. Editor: Robert Hall. Music: Tim Despic.
• With: Grace Caroline Currey, Virginia Gardner, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Mason Gooding.

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• What Is Cinema?

Fall Is a Dizzying, Thrilling Late-Summer Success

A simple “because it’s there” was justification enough for George Mallory to scale Mt. Everest. But for the courageous-foolish climber at the center of Fall (in theaters August 12), it’s grief that drives her up a looming, abandoned antenna tower, an attempt to feel alive again after a devastating loss. She has that in common with varied figures from cinema past, from the sad surfer in The Shallows to the mourning spelunker in The Descent to even Sandra Bullock ’s stricken astronaut in Gravity .

Fall , directed and co-written by Scott Mann , may be derivative in that way. It is also strongly redolent of the sleeper-hit shark thriller 47 Meters Down , both concerning two adventurous women finding themselves stuck in a terrible place. But Fall seems happy in that company; it doesn’t buck against convention so much as seek its own sturdy place within it. The film more than succeeds in that endeavor— Fall is an engrossing dog-days surprise, a nimble thriller that accomplishes a great deal with a remarkably small budget. (A reported $3 million.)

Grace Caroline Currey plays Becky, once an avid rock climber now in a stagnant haze following the death of her husband—which she and her best friend, Hunter ( Virginia Gardener ), witnessed up-close while traversing a cliff face. Hunter is a daredevil social media influencer, free-wheeling and reckless but certainly competent. She sets her eyes on a rusty tower in the middle of the desert because it seems like a novel thing to climb. Hunter coaxes her friend to come along, hoping some major risk-taking will shake Becky out of her malaise.

As the two ascend the tower, Mann ably builds the vertiginous tension. The tower creaks and groans; the ground below terribly recedes as the women work their way up a long and obviously corroded ladder. With clever camerawork and some judiciously applied visual effects, Mann gives the film a startling immediacy. It’s dizzying stuff, this obviously doomed journey into the sky. Fall achieves notes of poignant visual grace, too, especially a scene shot in silhouette as Becky and Hunter sit atop the tower, wondering what to do.

See, the ladder breaks, and their cellphones won’t work, and no one knows they’re up there. Fall is a survival story, a study in managed panic and clever resourcefulness. Befitting the genre, there’s even a menacing animal, one whose entrance has been nicely foreshadowed earlier in the film. Currey and Gardener convincingly render the nightmare, oscillating between the numbed calm of trying to work through a difficult problem and the emotionally ragged tenor of these two friends realizing the fatal hopelessness of their situation. 

A backstory secret is revealed, of course, one teased out subtly and then credibly processed by both characters. Fall ’s only major narrative misstep is a nasty twist that doesn’t add much to the film beyond extra, and unneeded, grimness. It’s also a twist that’s been done, in almost exactly the same way, in one of the films mentioned above. Fall is otherwise too inventive a film for such cheap mimicry.

Fall survives that bobble because what’s come before is so shrewdly staged. I know, intellectually, that these two actors weren’t really at the top of an enormous antenna while Mann and his camera circled them in a helicopter. But it often looks like that’s exactly what happened—much more so than in any number of movies that have spent lavishly on synthetic imagery at the expense of old-fashioned ingenuity. Fall is a crafty little movie that grips, and rarely lets go, for 100 or so minutes. It’s a welcome refreshment here in the badlands of August, when the search for excitement so often comes up short.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Fall’ on VOD, a Simple-Premise Thriller That’ll Feast on Your Acrophobia

Where to stream:.

• Fall (2022)

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Fall (now available to stream on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video ) is a classic single-location B-movie hyper-focused on exploiting a single elemental fear: very, very high heights (also known as acrophobia). And so two women clamber to the top of a supertall skinny thing and we endure a number of EFF-THIS moments for the better part of 107 minutes, and sometimes, if it’s done well, that’s all you need from a movie. Now let’s see if Fall does it right.

FALL : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Some call them thrillseekers, others call them maniacs: Three human beings are but dots on a massive cliff face. They climb, with ropes and harnesses and carabiners and those anchor thingies and NO FEAR BEYOTCH! Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and Dan (Mason Gooding) are a sweet young married couple stealing a smooch as they dangle, and Shiloh (Virginia Gardner) is the crazy one they jokingly call “Ethan Hunt.” But there’s an incident, and calling it merely an “incident” is like saying World War II was just a thing that happened once. Dan slips. Plummets. Screams. And from here, one can only make assumptions: He goes splat and ceases being alive.

SUBTITLE: 51 WEEKS LATER. Becky, despite being a Zillennial, still has an answering machine, which might be the film’s biggest test of our suspension of disbelief, and trust me, some real doozies are coming. It receives a call from her worried father (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). She’s not home to answer because she’s at the bar again. At the bottom of a bottle. Crocked. You can tell she’s depressed before we even see her bleary half-mast eyes, because there are empty pizza boxes and takeout containers strewn about her home. There’s also a bottle of pills in the liquor cabinet. She dumps them on the counter, and contemplates. Nearby, a cardboard box with a big label on it: CREMATED REMAINS. That’s all that’s left of poor Dan. And there’s not much left of poor Becky, either.

She really needs something to shake this brutal funk, and Shiloh has a great idea: They’ll drive out to that rusty old 2,000-foot decommissioned TV tower in the desert and climb the living crap out of it. That way Becky can stare her fears right in the face until they cry, and then scatter Dan’s ashes to the wind. Shiloh is a professional YouTube stunt doofus known as Danger D, and it’s therefore her job to be an annoying idiot. And so she squeezes into her cleavageiest push-up bra, grabs Becky and up they go, the ladder all rickety and oxidized, the wind moaning, and did they put on enough sunscreen? These white girls are pale .

Notably – and when I say “notably,” I mean, “someone wants to hammer on our skulls with quasi-symbolism” – before they get to climbing, they see some vultures snacking on some poor dead animals’ guts. Now, what kind of vultures are they? Well, they’re Vultures of Ominous Portent, of course. There are no other species of vulture, or other types of portent, in movies like this. And so Becky and Shiloh climb to the top and get some sickkkkkkk selfies and drone footage and climb back down and live happily ever after with all the likes and clicks they could ever possibly need to nurture and satisfy their souls. No! They actually climb to the top and slip on fresh vulture caca and fall down down down to their horrible awful deaths. No! I’m not gonna spoil it, you gotta suffer through an hour-plus of queasy instances of acrophobia yourself to find out what happens!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Vertigo , but stripped way, way, way, way down. But it reminds me more of 47 Meters Down , in which Mandy Moore and Claire Holt sit at the bottom of the ocean and try not to be eaten by a murdershark, or Frozen , wherein a trio of skiers get trapped on a chairlift over a long weekend.

Performance Worth Watching: Curry and Gardner are perfectly fine here doing the not very much that’s asked of them. So let’s use this space to heap praise upon the vulture wranglers, because we get so few opportunities to do so.

Memorable Dialogue: Shiloh delivers a good dual-threat howler because it works both in and out of context: “The vultures, they can smell your leg.”

Sex and Skin: None:

Our Take: Fall is clearly a movie written by Gen Xers making a statement about the folly of younger generations’ desire to be dipshits in an attempt to assuage the insatiable hunger of the internet. The cruel, harsh world – symbolized by the Vultures of Ominous Portent, of course – shall punishest thou for your foolhardy quest for meme fame, ye peabrained youths! Bottom line: Don’t be stupid, Gen Z dummies!

Am I reading too much into the subtext here? Perhaps the greater question is, why does the “modern twist” in a good old-fashioned low-budget dumbass thriller always have to involve tech and/or social media? Does it function as yet another metaphorical missive on how the internet will be the death of us all? I sigh, especially in the context of a movie that insists its twentysomething protagonist has a landline. And to that I say GET REAL, Hollywood hogwashers!

To be fair, on a surface level – and let’s be honest, that’s the level upon which Fall is intended to function – director Scott Mann effectively exploits all the stuff that’ll make you clench your glutes as our protagonists do desperate and/or foolhardy things: Loose rattling bolts on rickety ladders, unsettling silence, nerve-gnawing soundtrack cues, the cold dead eyes of unfeeling vultures. He knows how to effectively manipulate the base fears of his audience. The film suffers from pacing issues as it toys around with an unnecessary subplot designed to make us care about more than just the characters’ core survival; this type of keep-it-simple-stupid thing should be wrapping at 85 minutes. And then Mann pretty much shits the bed at the end, progressing from UH HUH levels of incredulity to an outright NAH, although it’s out-loud laughable enough to be entertaining. It could be worse, is what I’m saying. Way worse.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Come for the clenched-teeth-emojis, stay for the LOLs.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com .

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; Grit vs. Good Looks In the American West

By Janet Maslin

• Dec. 23, 1994

There's some mighty pretty country on display in "Legends of the Fall," Ed Zwick's big, fancy film based on Jim Harrison's lean, muscular novella. Not to mention the mighty pretty people roaming through it. Foremost among them is Brad Pitt, departing from the solemnity of his "Interview With the Vampire" performance and wearing a rakish grin as big as all outdoors. Mr. Pitt's diffident mix of acting and attitude works to such heartthrob perfection it's a shame the film's superficiality gets in his way.

But it does, maddeningly so. In gussying up this tale of a prosperous prairie family at the time of World War I, Mr. Zwick goes for the Kodak moment at every opportunity, drowning out dialogue with swelling music and sweeping scenery. Instead of simply letting its characters speak, this film would rather resort to handsome, sincere gazes from the photogenic principals. Mr. Zwick, whose visual grandiosity also showed in "Glory," hasn't cast a single actor who wouldn't be perfectly at home in a modeling spread, man, woman or child.

Beyond good looks, he has enlisted some serious, blue-eyed talent to play this story's fashion-plate ranchers: Anthony Hopkins as William Ludlow, a retired Army colonel, with Mr. Pitt, Aidan Quinn and Henry Thomas as his sons. In Mr. Harrison's story, two of those young men fall in love with the same woman. The movie, with characteristic extravagance, makes matters more confusing by involving her with all three.

The woman is Susannah (the graceful Julia Ormond), first spotted by one of the brothers "at a Harvard tea for Amy Lowell." Her arrival at the ranch is filmed with typical fanfare, as if it were an advertisement for outdoor life. Father and sons Samuel (Mr. Thomas) and Alfred (Mr. Quinn) arrive, looking shy and dashing; warm glances are exchanged all sides. Then Tristan (Mr. Pitt) thunders up on horseback, exuding the brash cowboy arrogance and giving Susannah, who is his brother Samuel's fiancee, one of the film's most meaningful looks. If we've seen "East of Eden," we know what it means.

But "Legends of the Fall," which opens on Christmas Day, has lots of other business to take care of. The story is heavily plotted, which turns Mr. Zwick's reliance on soggy wordless effects into a huge liability. And in such a relentlessly picturesque film, it's hard to accommodate Mr. Harrison's most macho flourishes, like the idea that after one of the brothers is killed in World War I, Tristan, the hunter and free spirit of the story, will cut his brother's heart out so it can be brought home for burial. No Kodak moment there -- though not for lack of trying.

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7 of Roger Ebert’s Most Brutal Movie Reviews

T he long Fourth of July weekend is another kind of holiday for film lovers: The documentary about beloved film critic Roger Ebert, Life Itself , hits theaters and on-demand services Friday. Directed by Steve James ( Hoop Dreams ), the film began as a loose adaptation of Ebert’s 2011 memoir of the same name, but as Ebert’s health declined — he was diagnosed with cancer in 2002 — the documentary became a frank, revealing and sometimes hard-to-watch look at his final days before his death in 2013. “I think it’s so poetic that a man like Roger, who spent his whole life reviewing movies, ends up ending his life on the big screen,” Ebert’s wife, Chaz Ebert, told Flavorwire in a recent interview.

Some of those movies he reviewed over the years were great — others, not so much. Reading Ebert’s passionate praise of exemplary filmmaking was a treat for readers, but his take-downs of the very worst of box offices provided another kind of joy. Here are seven of his most entertaining negative reviews.

Valentine’s Day Giving it two stars, Ebert didn’t totally trash this star-studded rom-com from 2010, but he also concluded his review with some sage dating advice: “ Valentine’s Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.”

North Ebert disliked North so much, one of the collections of his most negative reviews, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie , gets its name from his 1994 take: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.”

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Nobody really watches Michael Bay films expecting critically acclaimed works of art, but Ebert’s review of the 2009 blockbuster is just as fun, if not more: “[The movie] is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys.”

Caligula Ebert admitted he couldn’t even make it all the way through the film in his 1980 review: “ Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length … Caligula is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn.”

Police Academy This 1984 attempt at poking fun at cop movies failed miserably: “It’s so bad, maybe you should pool your money and draw straws and send one of the guys off to rent it so that in the future, whenever you think you’re sitting through a bad comedy, he could shake his head, and chuckle tolerantly, and explain that you don’t know what bad is.”

Deuce Bigalo: European Gigalo This 2005 piece also inspired the title of Ebert’s second collection of reviews about the worst movies: “[ Deuce star Rob] Schneider retaliated by attacking [ex-Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick] Goldstein in full-page ads … ‘Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers.’ … As chance would have it, I have won the Pulitzer Prize, and so I am qualified. Speaking in my official capacity as a Pulitzer Prize winner, Mr. Schneider, your movie sucks.”

Mad Dog Time The first line of this 1996 review doesn’t hold back: “ Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line.”

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Fall Review

02 Sep 2022

You can almost imagine the ’70s B-movie disaster-movie-poster tagline for Fall : something along the lines of “2,000 feet of TV tower terror!” This is an enjoyably throwback breed of thriller, a movie only interested in making your palms leak sweat and your adrenal glands go into overdrive. In those modest goals, it is entirely successful.

It’s a ruthlessly efficient genre exercise. Characters and their respective motives are established quickly and unfussily: Hunter (Virginia Gardner, in a fearlessly fun turn) is a thrill-seeking YouTuber chasing clout by clambering up the fictional tower; her best pal Becky (Grace Caroline Currey, the emotional anchor and audience surrogate for the “nope!” moments) is a grieving widower hoping to conquer her climbing fears. Both are seeking closure after tragedy hit 12 months earlier, in a Mission: Impossible 2 -style opening sequence (a comparison openly embraced when one character calls another “Ethan Hunt”).

So, against all available better judgement, the pair of friends agree to make the climb up the “fourth-tallest structure in the United States”, and within 20 minutes of elapsed runtime they're ascending the ladder. Soon enough, the rusty steel cables start rattling, and so do your nerves, leaving us under no illusions as to what kind of film this is. Essentially it’s a series of problems being solved under extreme conditions (How do we find a phone signal? How do we drink water? How do we wee?); setbacks piling up and minor victories being achieved. While that means it follows a fairly familiar route, there’s room for at least one major surprise.

Scott Mann’s direction and MacGregor’s vertiginous cinematography do a decent job of making a boringly functional structure look cinematic and exciting.

But it hardly matters if the plot is somewhat formulaic because the experience is so brilliantly executed; so richly, stupidly, edge-of-your-seat exciting. Scott Mann’s direction and MacGregor’s vertiginous cinematography do a decent job of making a boringly functional structure look cinematic and exciting; when a character looks down at one point, the camera whips down too. There are CGI and green screens, inevitably, but the location photography in California’s Shadow Mountains makes full use of natural light and big skies, totally selling the danger.

It’s silly. Of course it’s silly. You don’t need a science degree to know that multiple laws of physics are being defied. There are terrible decisions being made roughly every ten or 15 minutes (“It feels solid,” one character says of a ladder that looks anything but). There is dialogue about personal drama that feels like it could probably wait until after they’ve sorted all the life-or-death stuff first. It doesn’t matter: Fall aims to thrill, and succeeds with flying, vertigo-inducing colours.

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Speed Racer, Meet Bill, What Happens in Vegas, Noise, The Fall – 2008

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Roger Ebert's 10 greatest films of all time

By David Morgan

April 8, 2013 / 1:54 PM EDT / CBS News

Updated April 8 1:53 p.m. ET

(CBS News) There were few more passionate advocates for films as art than Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, who died Thursday at the age of 70 after a long battle against cancer.

Despite the seeming limitations of serving as the co-host of a syndicated TV review show and plying his trade in the Midwest (where distribution of independent or foreign-language films can be spotty at best), Ebert helped shine a light on deserving films to millions. He was an early supporter of such noted directors as Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and Werner Herzog, and his published collections of film criticism offered a bracing celebration of cinematic innovation and emotional clarity (and, in the case of "I Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie," a piercing cry against mediocrity).

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In 2012 the British Film Institute's Sight & Sound magazine polled international critics to choose their 10 favorite films, as it has every decade since 1952. Ebert once again offered his selection , despite his qualms about reducing his passion for the medium into a tidy Top-10 list. ("Lists are ridiculous, but if you're going to vote, you have to play the game," he relented.) Films which he'd previously included in his S&S polls, such as "Notorious" and the documentary "Gates of Heaven," he considered thusly canonized, and was willing to cut loose, to welcome new entries into the pantheon.

• "Vertigo" tops "Kane" in critics' poll of greatest films

The following, in alphabetical order, are Ebert's 2012 choices. Click through this gallery by the tabs up top to read excerpts from his published reviews.

"Aguirre, Wrath of God" (1972), directed by Werner Herzog

"Werner Herzog's 'Aguirre, the Wrath of God' is one of the great haunting visions of the cinema. It tells the story of the doomed expedition of the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, who in 1560 and 1561 led a body of men into the Peruvian rain forest, lured by stories of the lost city. . . .

"The film is not driven by dialogue . . . or even by the characters, except for Aguirre, whose personality is created as much by [Klaus] Kinski's face and body as by words. What Herzog sees in the story, I think, is what he finds in many of his films: Men haunted by a vision of great achievement, who commit the sin of pride by daring to reach for it, and are crushed by an implacable universe."

• Ebert review: "Aguirre, Wrath of God"

"Apocalypse Now" (1979) directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Ebert wrote in 1999, "[S]een again now at a distance of 20 years, 'Apocalypse Now' is more clearly than ever one of the key films of the century. Most films are lucky to contain a single great sequence. 'Apocalypse Now' strings together one after another, with the river journey as the connecting link. The best is the helicopter attack on a Vietnam village, led by Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), whose choppers use loudspeakers at top volume to play Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' as they swoop down on a yard full of schoolchildren. Duvall won an Oscar nomination for his performance and its unforgettable line, 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning.' His emptiness is frightening ..."

• Ebert review: "Apocalypse Now"

"Citizen Kane" (1941) directed by Orson Welles

" 'Rosebud' is the emblem of the security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain. It is the green light at the end of Gatsby's pier; the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what; the bone tossed into the air in '2001.' It is that yearning after transience that adults learn to suppress. 'Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get, or something he lost,' says Thompson, the reporter assigned to the puzzle of Kane's dying word. 'Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything.' True, it explains nothing, but it is remarkably satisfactory as a demonstration that nothing can be explained.

"'Citizen Kane' likes playful paradoxes like that. Its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding. I have analyzed it a shot at a time with more than 30 groups, and together we have seen, I believe, pretty much everything that is there on the screen. The more clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery."

• Ebert review: "Citizen Kane"

"La Dolce Vita" (1960) directed by Federico Fellini

"Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw 'La Dolce Vita'' in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom 'the sweet life'' represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello's world; Chicago's North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello's age.

"When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal. There may be no such thing as the sweet life. But it is necessary to find that out for yourself."

• Ebert review" "La Dolce Vita"

"The General" (1927) directed by Buster Keaton

"Buster Keaton was not the Great Stone Face so much as a man who kept his composure in the center of chaos. Other silent actors might mug to get a point across, but Keaton remained observant and collected. That's one reason his best movies have aged better than those of his rival, Charlie Chaplin. He seems like a modern visitor to the world of the silent clowns. ...

"Today I look at Keaton's works more often than any other silent films. They have such a graceful perfection, such a meshing of story, character and episode, that they unfold like music. Although they're filled with gags, you can rarely catch Keaton writing a scene around a gag; instead, the laughs emerge from the situation; he was 'the still, small, suffering center of the hysteria of slapstick,' wrote the critic Karen Jaehne. And in an age when special effects were in their infancy, and a 'stunt' often meant actually doing on the screen what you appeared to be doing, Keaton was ambitious and fearless. He had a house collapse around him. He swung over a waterfall to rescue a woman he loved. He fell from trains. And always he did it in character, playing a solemn and thoughtful man who trusts in his own ingenuity."

• Ebert review: "The General"

"Raging Bull" (1980) directed by Martin Scorsese

" 'Raging Bull' is not a film about boxing but about a man with paralyzing jealousy and sexual insecurity, for whom being punished in the ring serves as confession, penance and absolution. It is no accident that the screenplay never concerns itself with fight strategy. For Jake LaMotta, what happens during a fight is controlled not by tactics but by his fears and drives.

"Consumed by rage after his wife, Vickie, unwisely describes one of his opponents as 'good-looking,' he pounds the man's face into a pulp, and in the audience a Mafia boss leans over to his lieutenant and observes, 'He ain't pretty no more.' After the punishment has been delivered, Jake (Robert De Niro) looks not at his opponent, but into the eyes of his wife (Cathy Moriarty), who gets the message. . . .

" 'Raging Bull' is the most painful and heartrending portrait of jealousy in the cinema -- an 'Othello' for our times. It's the best film I've seen about the low self-esteem, sexual inadequacy and fear that lead some men to abuse women. Boxing is the arena, not the subject. LaMotta was famous for refusing to be knocked down in the ring. There are scenes where he stands passively, his hands at his side, allowing himself to be hammered. We sense why he didn't go down. He hurt too much to allow the pain to stop."

• Ebert review: "Raging Bull

"Tokyo Story" (1953) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

"It is clear that 'Tokyo Story' was one of the unacknowledged masterpieces of the early-1950s Japanese cinema, and that Ozu has more than a little in common with that other great director, Kenji Mizoguchi ('Ugetsu'). Both of them use their cameras as largely impassive, honest observers. Both seem reluctant to manipulate the real time in which their scenes are acted; Ozu uses very restrained editing, and Mizoguchi often shoots scenes in unbroken takes.

"This objectivity creates an interesting effect; because we are not being manipulated by devices of editing and camera movement, we do not at first have any very strong reaction to 'Tokyo Story.' We miss the visual cues and shorthand used by Western directors to lead us by the nose. With Ozu, it's as if the characters are living their lives unaware that a movie is being shot. And so we get to know them gradually, begin to look for personal characteristics and to understand the implications of little gestures and quiet remarks.

" 'Tokyo Story' moves quite slowly by our Western standards, and requires more patience at first than some moviegoers may be willing to supply. Its effect is cumulative, however; the pace comes to seem perfectly suited to the material. And there are scenes that will be hard to forget: The mother and father separately thanking the daughter-in-law for her kindness; the father's laborious drunken odyssey through a night of barroom nostalgia; and his reaction when he learns that his wife will probably die."

• Ebert review" "Tokyo Story"

"The Tree of Life" (2011) directed by Terrence Malick

"Terrence Malick's 'The Tree of Life' is a film of vast ambition and deep humility, attempting no less than to encompass all of existence and view it through the prism of a few infinitesimal lives. The only other film I've seen with this boldness of vision is Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and it lacked Malick's fierce evocation of human feeling. There were once several directors who yearned to make no less than a masterpiece, but now there are only a few. Malick has stayed true to that hope ever since his first feature in 1973.

"I don't know when a film has connected more immediately with my own personal experience. In uncanny ways, the central events of 'The Tree of Life' reflect a time and place I lived in, and the boys in it are me. If I set out to make an autobiographical film, and if I had Malick's gift, it would look so much like this."

• Ebert review: "The Tree of Life"

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) directed by Stanley Kubrick

"The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn't include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, '2001' is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe. ...

"The film did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The closing sequences, with the astronaut inexplicably finding himself in a bedroom somewhere beyond Jupiter, were baffling. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie.

"What he had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it -- not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it."

• Ebert's review: "2001: A Space Odyssey"

"Vertigo" (1958) directed by Alfred Hitchcock

" 'Vertigo,' which is one of the two or three best films Hitchcock ever made, is the most confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art. It is *about* how Hitchcock used, feared and tried to control women. He is represented by Scottie (James Stewart), a man with physical and mental weaknesses (back problems, fear of heights), who falls obsessively in love with the image of a woman -- and not any woman, but the quintessential Hitchcock woman. When he cannot have her, he finds another woman and tries to mold her, dress her, train her, change her makeup and her hair, until she looks like the woman he desires. He cares nothing about the clay he is shaping; he will gladly sacrifice her on the altar of his dreams."

• Ebert review: "Vertigo"

For more on Roger Ebert:

• rogerebert.com
• "Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert (Grand Central)

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The 50 Harshest Roger Ebert Movie Review Quotes

On his 70th birthday, it’s only right that we run down The 50 Harshest Roger Ebert Movie Review Quotes.

Image via Complex Original

Some professionals’ names are synonymous with their respective fields. If the common, non-hip-hop fan was asked to cite a rapper, for instance, he or she would most likely namedrop Jay-Z ; ask somebody who never watches ESPN to reference a basketball player, and you’ll probably hear LeBron James ’ name. Do the same for “film critic” and, chances are, the response will be Roger Ebert .

Having immortalized the “two thumbs up” rating system with the late Gene Siskel , made history when he became the first movie critic to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, and amassed the chutzpah to have his reviews syndicated throughout not only the United States, but all around the world, Ebert, who turns 70 today, is the long-reigning champion of cinematic analysis.

He’s not the granddaddy, however; in fact, the grandmommy, if you will, was the late Pauline Kael , the New York-based writer who Ebert described as having "had a more positive influence on the climate for film in America than any other single person over the last three decades." But Ebert has undoubtedly earned more widespread popularity throughout his illustrious career. And he’s continued to do so despite a near-fatal battle against thyroid cancer, the complications from which have left him unable to speak and dependent on a feeding tube. Yet Ebert’s writing hasn’t slowed down a bit.

The filmmakers behind his least favorite films probably aren’t happy about that. As excellently written as Ebert’s positive reviews are, it’s the Chicago-based critic’s negative reactions that have always been his most entertaining to read. Never one to pull punches, the Chicago Sun-Times M.V.P. is a master of the critical beatdown, whether he’s dropping hilarious insults, viciously bashing a movie without the faintest bit of humor, or offering random yet tangentially related musings that signify his disinterest.

We’re longtime readers of the man’s work, so, on his 70th birthday, it’s only right that we run down The 50 Harshest Roger Ebert Movie Review Quotes and celebrate his 45-year career the best way Complex knows how to: by reveling in the icon's most savage prose.

Written by Matt Barone ( @MBarone )

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50. Kazaam (1996)

"As for Shaquille O'Neal, given his own three wishes the next time, he should go for a script, a director, and an interesting character." — Roger Ebert

49. Valentine's Day (2010)

" Valentine's Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it's more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date." — Roger Ebert

48. Mad Dog Time (1996)

" Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I've seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you're not sure they have a bus line." — Roger Ebert

47. Tomcats (2001)

" Tomcats was written and directed by Gregory Poirier, who also wrote See Spot Run and thus pulls off the neat trick, within one month, of placing two titles on my list of the worst movies of the year. There is a bright spot. He used up all his doggy-do-do ideas in the first picture." — Roger Ebert

46. The Exterminator (1980)

" The Exterminator exists primarily to show burnings, shootings, gougings, grindings, and beheadings. It is a small, unclean exercise in shame." — Roger Ebert

45. Old Dogs (2009)

" Old Dogs seems to have lingered in post-production while editors struggled desperately to inject laugh cues. It obviously knows no one will find it funny without being ordered to. How else to explain reaction shots of a dog responding to laugh lines?" — Roger Ebert

44. Stargate (1994)

"The movie Ed Wood , about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for Stargate ." — Roger Ebert

43. A Lot Like Love (2005)

"To call A Lot like Love dead in the water is an insult to water." — Roger Ebert

42. Sorority Boys (2002)

"I'm curious about who would go to see this movie. Obviously moviegoers with a low opinion of their own taste. It's so obviously what it is that you would require a positive desire to throw away money in order to lose two hours of your life. Sorority Boys will be the worst movie playing in any multiplex in America this weekend, and, yes, I realize Crossroads is still out there." — Roger Ebert

41. The Secret of My Success (1987)

"Like most movies about mistaken identities, this one relies heavily on the Idiot Plot: Everyone in the movie is an idiot or the mystery would be solved in five minutes. Does the movie really believe anyone is as stupid as these characters? Does it care?" — Roger Ebert

40. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)

"Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson star. I neglected to mention that, maybe because I was trying to place them in this review's version of the Witness Protection Program. If I were taken off the movie beat and assigned to cover the interior design of bowling alleys, I would have some idea of how they must have felt as they made this film." — Roger Ebert

39. The Bucket List (2008)

"I urgently advise hospitals: Do not make the DVD available to your patients; there may be an outbreak of bedpans thrown at TV screens." — Roger Ebert

38. The Spirit (2008)

" The Spirit is mannered to the point of madness. There is not a trace of human emotion in it. To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material." — Roger Ebert

37. Seven Days in Utopia (2011)

"I would rather eat a golf ball than see this movie again." — Roger Ebert

36. 200 Cigarettes (1999)

"Seeing a film like this helps you to realize that actors are empty vessels waiting to be filled with characters and dialogue... Here they are contained by small ideas and arch dialogue, and lack the juice of life. Maybe another 200 cigarettes would have helped; coughing would be better than some of this dialogue." — Roger Ebert

35. The Beverly Hillbillies (1993)

"Here is a film with all of the wit of the road kill that supplies not one but two of the lesser jokes." — Roger Ebert

34. Johnny Be Good (1988)

"This movie is simply financial leakage, a squandering of resources equivalent to polluting a river or plowing under a rain forest. I'm serious. We're desperate for things to think about in this society, and these guys contribute to the situation by providing us with 86 minutes of zip. They oughta have their pictures on the post office wall." — Roger Ebert

33. Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992)

"The movie is more generous in showing what the visitors found here. Columbus encounters friendly Indians, of which one—the chief's daughter—is positioned, bare-breasted, in the center of every composition. (I believe the chief's daughter is chosen by cup size.) Columbus sails back to Europe and the story is over. Another Columbus movie is promised us this fall. It cannot be worse than this. I especially look forward to the chief's daughter." — Roger Ebert

32. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles (2001)

"I've seen audits that were more thrilling." — Roger Ebert

31. Diary of Forbidden Dreams (1976)

"If [a talented director has] made several good films, chances are that sooner or later someone will give him the money to make a supremely bad one. I wonder how much Carlo Ponti gave Roman Polanski to make Diary of Forbidden Dreams . Ten cents would have been excessive.” — Roger Ebert

30. The Last Airbender (2010)

" The Last Airbender is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here. It puts a nail in the coffin of low-rent 3D, but it will need a lot more coffins than that.” — Roger Ebert

29. 13 Ghosts (2001)

"The production is first-rate; the executives included Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis. The physical look of the picture is splendid. The screenplay is dead on arrival. The noise level is torture. I hope 13 Ghosts plays mostly at multiplexes, because it's the kind of movie you want to watch from the next theater." — Roger Ebert

28. Monsters, Inc. (2001)

"The sexy Celia (voice by Jennifer Tilly) has a crush on Wazowski. What she sees in him is beyond me, although if there is anyone who can figure out how to have sex with a green eyeball, that would be Jennifer Tilly. I can imagine her brassy voice: 'Blink! Blink!'" — Roger Ebert

27. Easy Come, Easy Go (1967)

"Elvis looks about the same as he always has, with his chubby face, petulant scowl, and absolutely characterless features. Here is one guy the wax museums will have no trouble getting right. He sings a lot, but I won't go into that. What I will say, however, is that after two dozen movies he should have learned to talk by now." — Roger Ebert

26. Breaking the Rules (1993)

"The movie has to be seen to be believed. It is a long, painful lapse of taste, tone, and ordinary human feeling. Perhaps it was made by beings from another planet, who were able to watch our television in order to absorb key concepts such as cars, sex, leukemia, and casinos, but formed an imperfect view of how to fit them together." — Roger Ebert

25. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) (2011)

"The film is reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless, and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency." — Roger Ebert

24. Sex Drive (2008)

" Sex Drive is an exercise in versatile vulgarity. The actors seem to be performing a public reading of the film's mastery of the subject. Not only are all the usual human reproductive and excretory functions evoked, but new and I think probably impossible ones are included. This movie doesn't contain 'offensive language.' The offensive language contains the movie." — Roger Ebert

23. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

"If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination." — Roger Ebert

22. The Village (2004)

"To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore. And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets." — Roger Ebert

21. Last Rites (1988)

"Many films are bad. Only a few declare themselves the work of people deficient in taste, judgment, reason, tact, morality, and common sense. Was there no one connected with this project who read the screenplay, considered the story, evaluated the proposed film and vomited?" — Roger Ebert

20. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (2012)

“As faithful readers will know, I have a few cult followers who enjoy my reviews of bad movies. These have been collected in the books I Hated, Hated, Hated, HATED This Movie; Your Movie Sucks , and A Horrible Experience of Unendurable Length . This movie is so bad, it couldn't even inspire a review worthy of one of those books. I have my standards.” — Roger Ebert

19. Revolver (2007)

"Some of the acting is better than the film deserves. Make that all of the acting. Actually, the film stock itself is better than the film deserves. You know when sometimes a film catches fire inside a projector? If it happened with this one, I suspect the audience might cheer." — Roger Ebert

18. The Blue Lagoon (1980)

"This movie could have been made as a soft-core sex film, but it's too restrained: There are so many palms carefully arranged in front of genital areas, and Brooke Shields' long hair is so carefully draped to conceal her breasts, that there must have been a whole squad of costumers and set decorators on permanent Erogenous Zone Alert." — Roger Ebert

17. Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)

"That makes Hellbound: Hellraiser II an ideal movie for audiences with little taste and atrophied attention spans who want to glance at the screen occasionally and ascertain that something is still happening up there. If you fit that description, you have probably not read this far, but what the heck, we believe in full-service reviews around here. You're welcome." — Roger Ebert

16. Battle: Los Angeles (2011)

"Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform them they are idiots. Young women: If your date likes this movie, tell him you've been thinking it over, and you think you should consider spending some time apart." — Roger Ebert

15. The Skulls (2000)

"The real Skull and Bones has existed for two centuries, and has counted presidents, tycoons, and CIA founders among its alumni. Membership was an honor—until now. After seeing this movie, members are likely to sneak out of the theater through the lavatory windows." — Roger Ebert

14. Battlefield Earth (2000)

" Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It's not merely bad; it's unpleasant in a hostile way." — Roger Ebert

13. Mr. Magoo (1997)

" Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted." — Roger Ebert

12. Dice Rules (1991)

" Dice Rules is one of the most appalling movies I have ever seen. It could not be more damaging to the career of Andrew Dice Clay if it had been made as a documentary by someone who hated him. The fact that Clay apparently thinks this movie is worth seeing is revealing and sad, indicating that he not only lacks a sense of humor, but also ordinary human decency.” — Roger Ebert

11. B.A.P.S. (1997)

"My guess is that African Americans will be offended by the movie, and whites will be embarrassed. The movie will bring us all together, I imagine, in paralyzing boredom." — Roger Ebert

10. Masterminds (1997)

"I stopped taking notes on my Palm Pilot and started playing the little chess game." — Roger Ebert

9. The Brown Bunny (2003)

"I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny ." — Roger Ebert

8. Armageddon (1998)

"No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out." — Roger Ebert

7. Little Indian, Big City (1996)

"There is a movie called Fargo playing right now. It is a masterpiece. Go see it. If you, under any circumstances, see Little Indian, Big City , I will never let you read one of my reviews again." — Roger Ebert

6. Caligula (1979)

" Caligula is sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash. If it is not the worst film I have ever seen, that makes it all the more shameful: People with talent allowed themselves to participate in this travesty. Disgusted and unspeakably depressed, I walked out of the film after two hours of its 170-minute length." — Roger Ebert

5. Joe's Apartment (1996)

"I am informed that 5,000 cockroaches were used in the filming of Joe’s Apartment . That depresses me, but not as much as the news that none of them were harmed during the production." — Roger Ebert

4. Godzilla (1998)

"Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter's Basilica." — Roger Ebert

3. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (2005)

" Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo makes a living cleaning fish tanks and occasionally prostituting himself. How much he charges I'm not sure, but the price is worth it if it keeps him off the streets and out of another movie." — Roger Ebert

2. Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

"This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels." — Roger Ebert

1. North (1994)

"I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it." — Roger Ebert

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Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, the harder they fall.

Now streaming on:

"The Harder They Fall" is a bloody pleasure: a revenge Western packed with memorable characters played by memorable actors, each scene and moment staged for voluptuous beauty and kinetic power. Jeymes Samuel , who cowrote, directed, and scored the movie, has not just studied the works of the directors he emulates, but understands what they were doing with image and sound, and  feels  it, surely in the way that he feels the craft involved in music he performs and produces under his stage name The Bullitts. It's a pity that this Netflix film will likely be seen mainly on handheld devices, laptops, and iPads, because (like other late-2021 releases, such as " The French Dispatch " and "Dune") it was plainly conceived with a movie house in mind. Samuel uses a very wide screen to frame shots that employ a lot of negative space and contain layers of information you have to focus on to appreciate, and gifts his actors with precious moments where their characters are allowed to listen to each other, silently glance at each other, and ponder their next move, often while enduring death-stares from enemies armed to the teeth.

Western history buffs should be warned, or at least notified, that while many of the major characters in the story share the same names as actual people who lived and died in the Old West, including Nat Love, Bass Reeves, Stagecoach Mary, Jim Beckwourth, and Cherokee Bill, the events they take part in are mostly made-up nonsense. They bear as much relation to reality as the events of a dreamscape Western like " The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ," "The Quick and the Dead," and " Posse " (to name just three Westerns this one cribs from) or a gangster movie like " Dillinger " and " The Untouchables ," the major events of which were so ludicrous that they might as well have been taking place on another planet, or in an alternate dimension. 

But this is a feature of the movie, not a bug. The entire project feels like a bit of a lark or an indulgence, until the point when it wipes the cocky grin off its face, embraces the melodramatic aspects of its central storyline, and becomes an earnest romance, a family tragedy, and a quasi-mythological story about how violence begets more violence, whether it's experienced in a saloon, on dusty streets, or in the privacy of a family home. (Three different characters in "The Harder They Fall" talk about their experiences with domestic abuse.)

Jonathan Majors , who came out of nowhere a few years ago to become one of the most reliable of leading men, stars as Nat Love, first depicted in flashback as a terrified child whose mother and father are murdered by the outlaw Rufus Buck ( Idris Elba ). As a parting gift, Buck draws his dagger and inscribes a crucifix into the boy's forehead. It marks the film's hero as meaningfully as the vertical sabre-scar on the Outlaw Josey Wales' face. As an adult, Nat becomes a feared gunslinger and outlaw, and finds himself embroiled in a combination adventure and revenge mission targeting the man who killed his parents. There are quick-draws, large-scale gunfights, horse stunts, and chases, a train robbery, bank robberies, and a couple of hand-to-hand brawls with fists, feet and makeshift weapons that are as good as any ever staged in a Western (with unabashedly modern fight choreography, though—like something out of a Bond or Bourne film). There are also musical numbers, and big sets painted in so many varied and vibrant hues and with so many modern touches that at times we seem to be touring an art installation on Western themes. A fight to the death between two characters in a barn is preceded by a walk through brightly dyed fabrics hanging on clotheslines; they look like those large-scale "wrapping" projects that Christo does on landscapes.

Samuel and his co-writer Boaz Yakin ("Remember the Titans," "Fresh") break the first section of the film into mirrored narratives, each dealing with one of the main criminal gangs: Nat's and Rufus'. At the start of the story proper, Rufus is doing federal prison time for bank robbery, but gets sprung by his right-hand woman Trudy ( Regina King , chewing up the screen as a sadistic, sneering baddie).

Trudy then leads Rufus' gang in a boarding action that takes over a U.S. Calvary-controlled train where Rufus is being held inside an iron vault as if he were a velociraptor (or Hannibal Lecter). It takes a rare actor to justify the buildup the director gives Rufus. The character's face is not seen in the opening sequence and doesn’t appear for 20 more minutes. When Trudy takes over the prison car and opens the vault door, the movie lets us search the darkness for a glimpse of him, like infantrymen with binoculars looking for Godzilla's dorsal fins in Tokyo Bay. Elba makes the wait worth it, imbuing his cynical, confident character with a free-floating sadness reminiscent of El Indio, the antagonist from " For a Few Dollars More " whose opium addiction numbed his awareness of his own monstrousness.

Unshackled at last, Rufus returns to the desert town he used to run, and finds his old partner Wiley Escoe ( Deon Cole , giving off Clarence Williams III vibes) lording it over the place as if he were the rightful owner. Rufus makes quick work of Wiley, but he doesn't kill him, and it's fun to watch the character come skulking through the film again at various junctures, wheedling and manipulating and double-crossing and doing whatever else he feels he needs to do to get ahead. Most, if not all of the characters have a similarly self-justifying code. Not for nothing do Samuel and costume designer Antoinette Messam outfit nearly every character in a black hat: it's not just a nod to the film's non-traditional casting, it's an acknowledgement that nearly every player in this story would be described as the antihero or villain if you made them the star of their own project. 

Samuel fills the screen with characters whose eccentricity, coolness, and layered psychology are conveyed with such economy that it's only when you look back on the picture that you realize that they only had a few minutes of the two-plus hour runtime to themselves. Although the film's sympathies are always with Nat, a traumatized boy imposing his manly will upon an unjust universe, for the most part it seems more invested in the idea that people are complicated and self-contradicting. And it portrays the jockeying of the two gangs over possession of assorted bank robbery hauls not as a battle between good and evil, but a competition between rival businesses trying to conquer the same market.

In addition to Elba, and King, Rufus's gang includes LaKeith Stanfield as Cherokee Bill, whose prolific kill record is undercut by rumors that he shoots his enemies in the back. Backing up Nat, we have Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary, a gun-for-hire who used to be Nat's lover and still carries a torch for him; Danielle Deadwyler as Cuffee, a Calamity Jane-type tomboy gunfighter who presents as male; RJ Cyler as Beckwourth, a pistol-twirling showboat who's obsessed with killing Bill in a legitimate quick-draw contest; and rifleman Bill Pickett ( Edi Gathegi ), who, in the words of Morgan Freeman's character in " Unforgiven ," could hit a bird in the eye flyin.'

Rolling his eyes as the types of viewers that Alfred Hitchcock derided as The Plausibles, the filmmaker goes for an operatic dream/nightmare feeling, creating (like Leone before him) a parallel, alternative version of the American West in which pistol shots reverberate like cannon fire, and gunfights become so acrobatic as to seem like an extension of martial arts.

Racism, genocide, and imperial arrogance exist in this film's universe and impact the lives of nonwhite people (one Black character reveals a neck scar indicating that he survived a lynching) but not to such an extent that they can't own bars, nightclubs, and banks, run thriving towns, and roam the frontier with cocky confidence in armed groups (just as white gunslingers did) without having to fear persecution or annihilation at any moment. Samuels' film is escapist, then, in a different sense than one in which that word is usually employed. The movie creates a fictional space where viewers who have traditionally been excluded from a genre can revel in its pleasures.

If there's a downside, it's that Samuel sometimes gets so enamored with the presentation of violence (and the buildup to violence) that the characters turn into action figurines. And some of the storytelling choices can feel counter-intuitive or worse (Stagecoach Mary has to be a damsel in distress for a bit, and the film's coyly referring to her as a "damsel" doesn't make the choice feel any less retrograde). To be fair, though, this has sometimes been a problem in films that "The Harder They Fall" appears to be channelling as well.

But even the missteps here are counterbalanced by seemingly out-of-nowhere choices that make you laugh because of their audacity, then sigh at their rightness, such as the way that both Rufus and Nat often whistle or sing melodies that also appear in Samuel's score or songs, making the movie seem as if it's constantly on the brink of turning into a Western musical: imagine "Annie Get Your Gun" directed by Hype Williams. Some of the scenes between Mary and Nat, particularly early on when she's shown performing onstage, echo Nicolas Ray's surreal but earnest " Johnny Guitar ", a  David Lynch favorite, and another Western that creates its own universe that is mainly about the storyteller's affinities.

The movie succeeds as pure spectacle, turning light, color, and motion into sources of pleasure. In a time of increasingly slovenly action filmmaking, it's a relief to find yourself in the hands of a director who knows what to do with a camera. Samuel brings a musical performer's sensibility to the staging of big moments. He and cinematographers Mihai Mălaimare, Jr. and Sean Bobbitt change angles or shift focus to create laughs or gasps; hold on striking images to create self-contained objects of beauty (such as a sniper's eye-view of a target or an overhead view of gunmen with very long shadows confronting each other in a street), and cast the laws of nature aside to get the movie to do what it needs to do to produce a certain feeling. Notice how, in the final showdown, the sun is all over the place, and yet always where it needs to be to create an iconic Western image, suitable for framing.

It's an actor's showcase as well—and as compelling as the actors in flamboyant supporting roles are, it would be a shame if the subtle, grounding work of Majors and Elba went unappreciated, because it's hard to imagine how their performances could be better. Elba brings a world-weary, self-disgusted quality to Rufus that is so fascinating on its own terms that when we finally get the pieces of the puzzle that unlock the core of the character's personality, it feels like a diminishment.

And Majors captures that mix of fearlessness and self-deprecation that audiences used to love in Harrison Ford heroes. Nat is a badass who can kill six men before their pistols can clear their holsters, but this is not a vain or even particularly swaggering performance. Majors leans into instances of comic misunderstanding, romantic longing, overconfidence, and physical vulnerability that define Nat at key points in the tale. Rather than undermine the character, these moments only endear him to us.

This is one of those movies that might come on TV while you're supposed to be doing something else, and that you'll end up watching the rest of the way through, because it's so much fun.

On Netflix today.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

The Harder They Fall (2021)

Rated R for strong violence and language.

139 minutes

Jonathan Majors as Nat Love

Zazie Beetz as Stagecoach Mary

Idris Elba as Rufus Buck

Regina King as Trudy Smith

Delroy Lindo as Bass Reeves

LaKeith Stanfield as Cherokee Bill

Danielle Deadwyler

Edi Gathegi as Bill Pickett

Deon Cole as Wiley Escoe

Julio Cedillo

Woody McClain

RJ Cyler as Jim Beckwourth

Damon Wayans, Jr.

Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine

• Jeymes Samuel

Writer (story by)

Cinematographer.

• Mihai Malaimare Jr.

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