Riding across Manhattan in a stretch limo in order to get a haircut, a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager's day devolves into an odyssey with a cast of characters that start to tear his world apart.
Cronenberg’s mannered, theatrical film feels studenty and a little embarrassing, with its fervent belief that didactic encounters are a powerful artistic statement, and that nihilistic clichés signal something bleakly profound.
Pattinson’s most daring performance yet. Which, true, isn’t saying much. But if he keeps raising his game in bold, weird movies like this, a new dawn could be breaking for R-Pattz.
A part hypnotic, part profound, part send-up meditation on our financially imploding time.
The film feels like a minor curio in the career of someone capable of delivering more fully realised cinematic derangement.
Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, though it has its chilling qualities, is not half as disturbing as what is going on in reality. Instead of pushing us into an unnerving new world, what Cronenberg does best, his Cosmopolis carries all the thrill of yesterday's news.
There’s not much more a master director could have done, except challenge the wisdom of his book purchase.
It's just so cramped and confined. It's a movie about danger in which nothing is credibly at stake.
Cold and bloodless.
Pattinson is better than in the recent Bel Ami but a film this boring won’t do his career any favours.
A smug, academic thesis on the evils of capitalism, Cosmopolis is as exciting as someone reading you the entire book in a flat, unvarying monotone.
This is a surpassingly odd film that some will reject outright, but I was totally won over.
Elegant, eloquent.
A stupefying bore.
This bristling evocation of the last days of capitalism is compelling and unsettling in equal measure but ultimately memorable for being so very close to recent global happenings.
David Cronenberg says Cosmopolis 'was like making a documentary'
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee from Friday June 29, 2012, until Thursday July 5, 2012. More info: www.dca.org.uk
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