Popular reviews

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★ 3

  *speaking with throat cancer voice box*
  What is love?
  Baby, don't hurt me
  Don't hurt me
  No more

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  Review by 𝔸ℕℕ𝔸 ★½ 21

  Let's play Godard bingo, y'all!

  a man narrating about deep philosophical things
  people smoking in cars
  a man hitting a woman
  repetitive sudden dramatic music
  a male protagonist who is demure and never laughs

  a fedora and trenchcoat
  a quote for the entire film (I shall fight so that failure is possible)
  a man lecturing a woman on very important things (tm)
  a bird's eye point of view of walking around traffic
  a naked or near naked woman

  a discussion about sadness or suicide
  a mysterious woman a man wants
  FREE SPACE (aka someone speaking French)
  two men philosophising about the state of things
  sudden choppy editing to a random image

  men fighting each other
  a discussion about death
  our…

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  Review by YI JIAN ★★★½ 12

  Poetic dialogue. Trench coats and dark rooms. This is Godard's noir. The guy makes cool films without breaking a sweat, creates characters as cool as him in the blink of an eye. There is no cool like Godard cool. It's in his blood. He oozes 350 coolness per second. Ask him how did he make it and he would probably blow cigarette smoke to your face.

  Alphaville is a film set in a dystopian future where emotions are outlawed. Fortunately for Mr. Caution, coolness isn't outlawed. If it was then it still wouldn't matter because he's cool like that. Surprisingly for an outlander like Caution, he showed less emotion than the citizens of Alphaville. He's never angry. He never cried.…

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ suspirliam ˊˎ˗ ★★★ 1

  alpha 60 needs some strepsils

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★½

  Casting Paris as the center of a bleak dystopian society and then shooting without a single futuristic set or special effect is such a sick burn.

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★ 19

  Possibly Godard's most entertaining movie, with precious little politics and an honest-to-goodness detective-thriller-in-the-future plot. My favorite moments are when Godard pares down the genre he's working in to its barest essentials - a shootout in a hallway is reduced to a second or two, with a quick cut from a forehead bullet wound to a shot of several bad guys unconscious on the floor - handily demonstrating that you don't really need anything more than that (or at least I don't).

  It's a fitting demonstration given the themes of the movie, which is all about romance, poetry, and lyricism triumphing over cold logic and science. The eggheads will tell you that you need elaborate action and special effects to make a movie exciting, but we illiterates know better.

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  Review by nick ★★★★

  Alphaville is an extremely ambitious attempt from Godard, to create a unique science-fiction/arthouse-cinema hybrid, while remaining highly conscious of the political and social dilemmas of the past, the future, and the present. It's highly poetic, against a framework of emotionless scientific basis, which is an inviting contrast on its own.

  Depicting a strange, emotionally detached extraterrestrial city and its sinister mechanism, Alphaville never intends to reply on a high production value to convey a message. With supreme camera work and character building, Godard simply rose above a highly limited budget to portray a bone-chilling, symbolic world that no bigger budget could ever replicate. Sarcasm of communism, fear of technology and craving of love and art are intertwined in this micro tale of modern fable, where love conquers hate and poem conquers logic. It's simply a masterpiece with a message that will never go out of style. Highly recommended.

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  Review by rodrigo ★★★★ 1

  who needs to understand what the hell is going on when the vibes are this sick and anna karina looks stunning as always

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  Review by abigail. ★★ 2

  i don’t give a fuck

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  Review by cuckoochanel ★★★½ 17

  Immediately following the finalization of their divorce, Jean-Luc Godard once again places Anna Karina in the nucleus of a world representative of his obsessions—namely love and its inability to exist in a society of cultural decay—in his ninth feature, Alphaville. Presented as a sci-fi detective story, Godard reprises American ex-pat Eddie Constantine’s iconic role as Lemmy Caution to be his most composed raisonneur yet.

  Godard’s biggest indictment in Alphaville is two-fold: the corrosion of society through complicity via the suppression of consciousness, language, art, and emotion, and the woman’s role specifically as public enemy #1 within the fall of modern civilization. Women in Alphaville are depicted as emotionally inert prostitutes who consider their station within society to be “normal”. They…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 6

  "I refuse to become what you call normal."

  The rise of individualism against the tyranny of techno-capitalist conformity.

  On the surface, Alphaville presents a lot of similarities to another famous sci-fi neo-noir, Blade Runner, laying the foundation almost two decades in advance. Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a secret agent who’s part James Bond and part Philip Marlowe; a world-weary detective who looks great in a suit and can hold his own in a fight. He’s come to Alphaville from the Outlands posing as a journalist in order to investigate the disappearance of another agent as well as the mysterious creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braum. His mission brings him closer and closer to the artificial intelligence Alpha 60, the…

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  Review by sirrah993 ★★★★ 3

  The ending to Alphaville is something like this:

  United States: [bans Tik-Tok]

  Teens in the United States: [lose all sense of time and place, and starts hugging the walls for support]

  Pretty accurate.