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Reviews Counted:41
Fresh:11
Rotten:30
Average Rating:4.7/10
Consensus: Boarding Gate has little substance beneath its faux-thriller surface, and marks a step down from director Olivier Assayas' usual work.
Synopsis: Director Oliver Assayas has established his name by crafting well-made erotic thrillers like DEMONLOVER and CLEAN. The director sticks closely to his guns by adding another similarly themed entry... [More]
Starring: Asia Argento, Michael Madsen, Carl Ng, Kelly Lin
Director: Olivier Assayas
Boarding Gate's surfaces are often so staggeringly beautiful that its superficiality becomes forgivable, with the pleasant distractions of Assayas' multi-layered frames, Argento's sinewy allure, and snippets of Brian Eno ambience on the soundtrack.
The latest entry in this perplexing preoccupation with lowlifes is Boarding Gate, an astonishingly un-thrilling thriller.
It's not a perfect movie. At times, it's not even a movie. Yet the overall taste Boarding Gate leaves behind is intriguing enough to appreciate the whole elongated enterprise.
Did you ever want to like a movie and wish it were better so that you could? On the other hand, you could say that any sighting of Asia Argento showing off her thighs can't be all bad.
Argento never engages us as a character; she's like some porny dress-up (or, rather, dressdown) doll with a plastic visage and hollow head.
Call it a cinema of guilty pleasure, and don't worry if you fall asleep in your seat after the sex scene is over. You won't be alone.
In the "B" movie days, a story like this would shoot by in about 70 minutes without time to pick holes in the motives. But Assayas takes a bloated, boring 106 minutes.
A mostly dull and nonsensical attempt at a revenge thriller that trips and falls flat on its face far too many times to stand up to some of [Assayas'] stronger work.
Though graced with a performance by the fascinating Asia Argento, this noir film is difficult to follow.
Riveting to watch largely due to Asia Argento's presence, Assayas' new film, suitably placed at the Midnight Section, displays visual fluency and other innovative devices deiberately applied to a lower-level subject that some will dismiss as trash.
This one is just murk.
The film hasn't much substance beneath its showy surface.
When all the nonsense of Boarding Gate ends, only Asia remains in memory. She can light up the best and the worst of 'em.
absolutely silly
Chock full of elements that never spark beyond one-sheet dimension.
Boring gate.
As for Argento … yeah, she’s got something. Now we’d like to see her in a movie that makes sense.
Distills genre tropes (and their consequent pleasures) to their lean, potent essence.
[Assayas] has concocted a plot that is dizzying and annoying at times, and it's hard to care about the characters in the shifting story. But B-movie veteran Argento's portrayal of Sandra is like watching a car careening down an incline.
The plot may be murky, but actress Asia Argento is a clear and commanding force throughout.
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