Pola X

Name: Pola X
Director: Leos Carax
Released: 1999

Synopsis

A writer leaves his upper-class life and journeys with a woman claiming to be his sister, and her two friends.

83
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
It's compelling, poetic, rebellious, funny and one of the few movies that feels like it's been culled from another time and place yet broodingly bends modern societal taboos.
80
Los Angeles Times
Plays out the notion of the forces of light being inexorably drawn to those of darkness, of the older generation betraying the younger and maybe even an indictment of European indifference to the Balkans' agony.
80
Film.com
I'm not sure how elaborately I could defend Pola X, but I loved watching it.
80
L.A. Weekly
The film is at once breathtaking and ridiculous, and it's the tension between these two extremes, as well as Carax's own intoxicating style, that makes it essential viewing.
70
Village Voice
This moody, rapturous adaptation of Pierre, Herman Melville's gothic follow-up to "Moby Dick," is never less than seriously romantic.
63
San Francisco Examiner
A less confrontational, though positively gushing modernization of "Pierre, or the Ambiguities."
60
Chicago Reader
Carax has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him.
50
Variety
An often intriguing, sometimes hypnotic work, but one that quickly starts to unravel in the final hour as it becomes clear there’s not much beneath the emperor’s clothes.