Popular reviews

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  Review by Andy Summers 🤠 ★★★★½ 8

  There are some movies that are so "cult" that even regular film fans wouldn't have even heard of them. That's exactly how I felt last year when I saw Vanishing Point for the very first time. It was a bolt from the blue, a true revelation, a stunningly cool and subversive movie that I simply loved. Richard C Sarafian also turned a 1970 Dodge Challenger into another of those cars to purchase when that lottery win arrives.
  Barry Newman became the ultimate anti-hero with his stellar turn as the iconic Kowalski, a former war hero, policeman, and racing driver with inner demons that eat at his soul. He's now a car delivery driver with a speed habit and another kind…

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  Review by WraithApe ★★★★ 34

  If you're lucky, "a great car chase" is something you can attribute to a movie, well this whole movie is a great car chase - from Denver, Colorado across the state lines of Utah and Nevada to Sweet Oblivion, California. What begins as a high adrenaline police chase with no discernible felony having been committed morphs over the course of two days and nights into an existential journey into the old mystic West; an epitaph for a revolutionary decade of free love whose flame is all too soon to be extinguished.

  As with Bullitt before it, the car is the undisputed star. That iconic white '70 Dodge Challenger, cutting a path through the Bonneville Salt Flats like an ashen phantom…

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  Review by CinemaVoid 🏴‍☠️ ★★★★ 1

  2.000 kilometers in less than 15 hours equals roughly 500kph. Kowalski didn’t need a Dodge Challenger, he needed KITT. Maybe Herbie.

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  Review by Josh Gillam ★★★½ 2

  For a film driven almost entirely by high-speed car chases Vanishing Point works under its own quirky, idiosyncratic rhythm: it’s really a story about an individual against the establishment, Kowalski (Barry Newman)’s pursuit by the police a symbol of personal freedom gradually encroached on by restrictions around every corner. 

  This owes a fair bit to Easy Rider in that     sense, sharing a similarly pared down, ambiguous approach, but setting this story a few years on from its end-of-decade predecessor. Through Kowalski’s encounters the film paints a striking little snapshot of early 70s Americana, 60s rebellion still lingering in the background. 

  The story’s attempts to paint our hero and his journey as this big extended metaphor for counterculture and…

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  Review by BeardofTsu ★★★★½ 4

  And there goes the Challenger, being chased by the blue, blue meanies on wheels. The vicious traffic squad cars are after our lone driver, the last American hero, the electric centaur, the, the demi-god, the super driver of the golden west! Two nasty Nazi cars are close behind the beautiful lone driver. The police numbers are gettin' closer, closer, closer to our soul hero, in his soul mobile, yeah baby! They about to strike. They gonna get him. Smash him. Rape... the last beautiful free soul on this planet.

  We definitely need more movies like this where cool dudes possibly not of this world are just driving around taking bets, picking up gay hitchhikers, happening across naked broads on motorbikes…

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  Review by Brian Saur ★★★★½ 10

  Fathers Day 2024: Took my whole family to El Coyote for dinner and then up the street to The New Beverly for VANISHING POINT. Definitely a more enigmatic film than they are used to but we had a nice discussion about it afterwards. Just the look on my 15 year old daughter’s face at the end of the movie was kind of priceless (even though she didn’t love it she definitely got more engaged in the 2nd half). A successful night at the movies all told.

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  Review by Jerry ★★★★ 21

  Live fast, die hard.

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🐝 ★★★★ 1

  The original Need For Speed.

  Vanishing Point had me wondering which was easier to portray with beauty in a movie - emptiness or chaos. With emptiness, the general calmness of what is being portrayed should make for a stiller picture and easier to capture beauty within. Yet constant, unfettered movement in itself as a beauty to it that can be harnessed to make an extraordinary spectacle. As was proven by Koyaanisqatsi.

  For the most part this is a film that looks as though it is very much in the chaos bracket, almost constantly in movement as we chase Barry Newman across the hopeless scorched and chokingly dusty American landscape. It's a landscape that isn't that much more of a blur…

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  Review by Sofa Sinema ★★★★½ 4

  "I think it [film] photographs the soul, whereas digital doesn't get into that dimension."

  One of the many erudite statements from director Richard C. Sarafian on his best known film. He's got a lot of love for his small and dedicated crew; there were only nineteen full time on this streamlined production. An extremely challenging shoot for everyone involved especially shooting those complex stunt sequences in extreme desert heat. That nude motorcycle girl apparently got sunburned in some rather private places. Sarafian speaks frequently of DP John A. Alonzo and even says up front that he was essentially co-director. Sarafian recorded this track about a decade before he passed, but his respect for those craftsman and their contributions is nicely preserved in this highly anecdotal commentary.

  Respect and regards to recently departed star Barry Newman.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  Formal essentialism: just the road and a car moving fast with a series of signfiers manipulated for effect but in the service of disappearing into speed. Like Two Lane Blacktop, it is a repurposed western, but as much as Infante's script uses Newman's driver as a laconic genre figure, it is far more exciting. It makes ample use of counterculture, but Sarafian allegiance is for a mix of existential dread and threatening violence.

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  Review by Joe Lynch ★★★½

  A wonderfully strange film, the kind that would get laughed out of a pitch meeting these days.
  Safarian creates a casual chaos in the Ballad of Kowalski on his Last Ride and the mix of velocity and laconic music choices creates a prototype for that “Saturday Afternoon” type film that Burt described SMOKEY & THE BANDIT as (with a very different ending, natch.)
  Like smoking a joint and drinking a red bull simultaneously.

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  Review by ELECTRICWIZARDx ★★★★★ 4

  An outlaw Two-lane. Centre lines turned singular in order to stay ahead of a fast-spreading death. You can't be left dead in the wake if you're in front. The death of the old west westerns transferred into the death of the 60s. Challenger tires rolling over the very same dust, desert and clay the hooves of horses used to, only now there's the long, straight blacktop to guide the way into fatalistic oblivion.

  The expanse of nothing lets you dwell on a past lives you'll never see again when you're on purgatory asphalt. Sex, love and fire. Left in the dust rotting like a mouflon that gave in to desert thirst; leaving nothing behind but a distinct skull with unique…