Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
We follow 24 hours in the life of a being moving from life to life like a cold and solitary assassin moving from hit to hit. In each of these interwoven lives, the being possesses an entirely distinct identity: sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, sometimes youthful, sometimes old. By turns murderer, beggar, company chairman, monstrous creature, worker, family man.
Holy Motors is one of the most singular cinematic visions of the 21st century. Denis Lavant delivers a staggering, shape-shifting performance across wildly disparate vignettes — physical, emotional, and utterly committed — earning a genuine 4 for Acting. The cinematography, helmed by Caroline Champetier, is gorgeous and inventive, shifting registers and visual grammar to match each episode's distinct world. Novelty is an unambiguous 4: the film's conception — a man cycling through identities in a white limousine, observed by no one, for reasons left deliberately opaque — is wholly unlike anything else in world cinema. The plot earns a 3 rather than higher because its episodic, deliberately fragmented structure is more a series of provocations than a sustained narrative — compelling but by design resistant to conventional dramatic momentum. The ending, while haunting and memorably strange (the talking limousines, the final domestic tableau), doesn't quite deliver the emotional culmination its audacity seems to promise, landing at a 3.