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Aram Rappaport ’s “The Crash” marks a very undistinguished convergence of two genres that have burgeoned in recent years: dark, brooding financial dramas reflecting fears unleashed by the 2008 economic recession, and thrillers that hinge on the spiraling perils of computers and related technologies.

But the movie may find its real niche in history by belonging to another, very curious and inevitably rather risible subgroup: Films Made in the Expectation that Hillary Clinton Would Become President.

Set in the very near future, “The Crash” concerns an effort to thwart a hacking of the stock market that could wreak havoc on the whole financial system, an effort involving members of the White House staff. Since their work reaches to the top of the executive branch, we occasionally hear mention of “Madame President.” Late in the story, we even catch glimpses of that eminence, who sweeps through a couple of scenes in a bustling, official hurry. She has straight blonde hair that obscures her face when she leans forward, but we know who this is supposed to be.

No doubt half of Americans could view this character with sarcastic satisfaction, while the other half might cringe with the realization that, a certain glass ceiling having remained undamaged by the 2016 election, “Madame President” will for the foreseeable future mark any movie as to belonging the realm of fiction—or erroneous anticipation.

Ironically, it’s not the defeated candidate but the victor of the last election whose lifestyle is most evoked by this film’s protagonist. Rather than being a real-estate tycoon and reality-TV star, however, Guy Clifton ( Frank Grillo ) is a flashy criminal who has managed to hold onto his palatial estate despite having been indicted for illegal stock-trading activities that have entailed some masterly hacking skills on his part.

“The Crash” kicks off when the feds, having found out about a planned hack by parties unknown that could collapse the U.S. stock market on a certain date, see no better course than to ask Guy to head up an attempt to derail the dastardly crime and discover its perpetrators. To that end, he assembles a small team of geeks with the skills to tackle the unconventional technical challenge.

There are two potential pitfalls in any film with this one’s premise, and “The Crash” tumbles into them both. One is that the peril being combated is too abstract to carry the emotional urgency of, say, an alien invasion or asteroid hurtling toward the earth. A stock market crash? The film imagines its disaster as prompting a run on the banks, and it provides glimpses of people fighting to reach ATMs. But all of this, it must be admitted, is not exactly California falling into the San Andreas fault on the fright-o-meter scale.

The other, related pitfall comes from a story that concerns high-tech dangers and remedies remaining too bound by them. Which is to say, this is the latest film with far too many scenes of people waving their arms in front of computers, shouting about algorithms and such. It’s a drawback only compounded by Rappaport’s style, which marshals enough shaky-cam spasmodics, unnecessary zooms, herky-jerky editing and other predictable visual tics to make the film look like a television cast-off.

Granted, Rappaport’s script tries to combat the two pitfalls just mentioned by introducing melodramatic elements concerning, say, Guy's unsteady relationship with his wife (British-accented Minnie Driver ) and their daughter, who is beset not only with cancer but also a sketchy boyfriend and guilt over her family’s wealth. But none of this goes very far toward making Guy an interesting character, nor does Grillo’s performance, which comes across mostly as Pacino Lite (i.e., the recessive and smoldering Al, rather than the wildly gesticulating, eye-rolling, shouting-to-the-rafters Al).

Without giving too much away, it must be noted that other political discontents of recent times appear in the film’s depiction of its baddies: the heads of the nation’s major banks and the Federal Reserve System. These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra ’s most feverish populist nightmares. One might well believe in their monumental greed and malign intentions in real life, especially if the outgoing president had thrown any of their sort in prison. Here, they just serve as a reminder that fiction can hardly remedy what politics leaves untouched.

Godfrey Cheshire

Godfrey Cheshire is a film critic, journalist and filmmaker based in New York City. He has written for The New York Times, Variety, Film Comment, The Village Voice, Interview, Cineaste and other publications.

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Film Credits

The Crash (2017)

Rated R for language throughout.

AnnaSophia Robb as Creason Clifton

Dianna Agron as Amelia Rhondart

Ed Westwick as Ben Collins

Maggie Q as Nurse Hilary

Minnie Driver as Shannon Clifton

John Leguizamo as George Diebold

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Mary McCormack as Sarah Schwab

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Andrew James Allen as Mathas Harrison

Christopher R Ellis as Jason Schwab

Jim Ortlieb as Jeff Grillstein

Shannon Brown as Sinclair Mandes

Jessa Zarubica as Rebecca Abby

Terry Hamilton as John Roth

• Aram Rappaport

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Is Crash Truly the Worst Best Picture?

The high moral drama of the 2006 oscar winner is still infuriating, but also completely watchable..

When you strip away all the surrounding clatter that’s now attached to Crash —the legend of its surprise 2006 Best Picture win, the vicious backlash against its victory—and watch the movie today, what remains striking about this ensemble drama is just how confidently made it is. A filmmaker fully in control of the story he’s telling, Paul Haggis (who also co-wrote the screenplay) wasn’t just tackling racism: He was showing how divisions of all kinds—whether because of age, gender, economic status, or the specific section of Los Angeles where you live—create imperceptible but significant fissures between people. Meticulously crafted and anchored by a superb cast that imbues the film with feeling, Crash is as compulsively watchable now as it was when it was released a decade ago. Also still true: It’s an infuriating, awful movie.

As with plenty of Oscar winners, Crash ’s backstory is now almost as well known as the film’s plot. Most have heard that Haggis, an Emmy-winning television writer who worked on shows as diverse as The Facts of Life and thirtysomething , got carjacked in 1991 after going to a screening of The Silence of the Lambs . Holding onto that traumatic experience for years, he woke up in the middle of the night shortly after 9/11, motivated to hit the keyboard and bang out some initial ideas for what would become Crash , a film that follows the exploits of a disparate cross-section of Angelenos over the course of about 24 hours.  

In many ways, Crash ’s making and its eventual Oscar triumph are an inspiring, unicorn-rare exception to how Hollywood and awards season normally work. Financed independently and shot on a relatively shoestring budget of about $7 million, the project came together because actor Don Cheadle, who signed on as a producer, and his fellow cast members agreed to defer their usual fees, an indication of how passionately those involved felt about the script. Facing off against higher-profile names like George Clooney ( Good Night, and Good Luck ) and Steven Spielberg ( Munich ) for Best Picture—not to mention the critically beloved Ang Lee romantic drama Brokeback Mountain — Crash pulled off the upset. This was a true underdog indie film put out by the then-tiny distributor Lionsgate (long before the company got into the Hunger Games business) that managed to claim the industry’s top prize.

And yet Crash remains one of the most derided Best Picture winners, its name practically emblematic of the Academy’s penchant for wrongheaded choices. Despite generally positive reviews upon release, it’s been called the “ worst movie of the decade ” and the worst Best Picture winner ever. Viewed ten years later, all that vilification isn’t entirely fair. In the age of #OscarsSoWhite, give Crash credit for being one of the few recent Oscar champs to make characters of color not just supporting players but central figures in its drama. And then lament that Haggis’s faith in his earnest, melodramatic material belies how misguided the entire project is.

Moving between Brentwood, Downtown and the Valley, Crash lays out what appear to be separate storylines until it becomes clear how these characters are connected in our tidy little moral drama. Cheadle’s emotionally closed-off cop is actually the older brother of Larenz Tate’s carjacking brother, who unsuspectingly takes a fateful ride with Ryan Phillippe’s honorable rookie cop, who used to be partnered with Matt Dillon’s bigoted policeman, who ends up rescuing Thandie Newton’s resentful wife from a burning car after he’d earlier groped her during a traffic stop. Insisting that we’re all invisibly linked to one another, Crash makes its case by stacking the deck so that nobody in the movie is just some ordinary, average schlub living his life: It’s not a small world but, rather, a rigged one masterminded by Haggis.  

At a moment when race relations and police brutality remain at the forefront of the national conversation, Crash should be as timely as ever. It isn’t. Watching the film now, its depiction of why we can’t all just get along appears maddeningly untethered to the ways Americans actually experience (and, sometimes, help perpetuate) distrust and prejudice. Haggis, who had written the previous year’s Best Picture winner Million Dollar Baby , never claimed to solve racism with Crash , but his movie did something almost as offensive: reduced a societal ill to a narrative device, the grist for convoluted dramatic ironies that could be held up to the audience as cutesy indicators of the crazy randomness of modern life in a big city.

Crash is the sort of movie that, after establishing that Phillippe’s good-guy cop recognizes his partner’s racism, will be sure to balance the cosmic scales later, having him murder Tate’s unarmed character after a tragic misunderstanding just to prove the filmmaker’s thesis that, hey, everybody’s a little bit racist. Haggis has characters hurl nasty epithets at one another, as if that’s the most corrosive aspect of discrimination, failing to acknowledge that what’s most destructive aren’t the shouts but, rather, the whispers—the private jokes and long-held prejudices shared by likeminded people behind closed doors and far from public view. Even though I agree with Haggis that we all contain trace elements of intolerance that even we don’t recognize, Crash never dares to contend with racism’s evil, infectious power—instead, it makes its characters’ regrettable actions so uncomplicated that we don’t see our own similar failings up there on the screen. Despite Haggis’s endless attempts to interweave the lives of his seemingly dissimilar individuals, he never bothers to include the audience in his calculus, allowing viewers to stand outside the drama in order to judge it from a safe perspective. The whole world’s terrible, but thank god us fortunate few in the theater are wise enough to know better.

All the anger directed at Crash , perversely, is a reflection of the film’s assured execution. A movie this exasperating could only have been made by true believers, and you see it not only in Haggis’s elaborate, jigsaw-puzzle narrative design but in the mostly fine cast he’s assembled. For every questionable choice—say, tapping eternal lightweight Brendan Fraser to play the city’s district attorney—there’s a discovery of a new talent, like Michael Peña, who shines in an underdeveloped role as a locksmith. Even characters stuck as shards of dull glass in Haggis’s overall mosaic are redeemed by the performances Cheadle, Dillon, and others bring to them. (And it’s illuminating to see Sandra Bullock, trying to create empathy for her shrewish Westside wife, begin to lay the foundation for the dramatic performances that would later lead to her Oscar for The Blind Side .)

Haggis’s actors are so committed that they draw you into the movie’s simplistic spell—they make Crash just compelling enough for its gimmicks to fully enrage you. And what gimmicks they are. Ten years after its Oscar triumph, Crash still contains two of the most unabashedly operatic scenes I’ve ever seen—Dillon’s rescue of Newton from that burning car, and the slow-motion gunpoint showdown between Peña and a Persian shopkeeper (Shaun Toub)—and while both remain risible, Haggis’s investment in their grandiose, ludicrous poetry is something to see. A more moderate, reasonable filmmaker would have had the good sense to ease up on the throttle, but Haggis’s certainty steamrolls over any consideration of half measures.

That conviction must have been part of the reason Crash won Best Picture ten years ago. Academy voters are just like the rest of us: They know we live in a very complex world rife with problems that seem intractable, and sometimes we’d like just a smidgeon of assurance that we’re not all careening off the edge of a cliff. Into that void stepped Crash , a confident drama that didn’t offer to cure racism but at least promised to neutralize it for two hours through the merits of passionate acting and clever filmmaking. But Crash ’s crippling limitations end up serving as a warning against passion, cleverness, and confidence. If not properly monitored, they’re all just forms of self-delusion, the very same quality that allows bigotry and ignorance to flourish. The older I get, the more I prefer not being sure of anything. 

For more on the Academy Awards, listen to the latest episode of the  Grierson & Leitch  podcast:

Grierson & Leitch write about the movies regularly for the  New Republic  and host a podcast on film,  Grierson & Leitch . Follow them on Twitter  @griersonleitch  or visit their site  griersonleitch.com .

Tim Grierson is the senior U.S. critic for  Screen International , chief film critic for  Paste  and a contributing editor at Backstage and MEL.

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Best-Picture Winner Crash Just Turned 15. Is Anybody Celebrating?

By K. Austin Collins

“I believe that occasionally a film comes along that can have an influence for the better, and maybe even change us a little,” wrote the late Roger Ebert in 2006 . The line comes not from his (famous? infamous?) four-star review of Paul Haggis’s Crash , but rather from a follow-up on the movie written months later in response to fellow critics—a good number of whom had already been talking a little too much shit about the film, months before a surprised Jack Nicholson announced it as 2006’s best-picture winner and launched Crash -hating as a competitive sport.

The movie, an intricate, message-first melodrama of racial and social animus set in contemporary Los Angeles, was Ebert’s number one pick of the year. It appeared on a handful of other major lists too: Entertainment Weekly , Rolling Stone , Time , the Washington Post , LA Weekly . So Ebert was hardly alone in loving the film, which had the added public appeal of a broad, well-known cast: Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Ludacris, Terrence Howard, Brendan Fraser, Ryan Phillippe, Jennifer Esposito, Thandie Newton, Michael Peña, Larenz Tate, Shaun Toub.

Had he been the movie’s only critical defender, Ebert still wouldn’t have been alone in his affection. Crash grossed $98 million worldwide on a $6.5 million budget thanks, in no insignificant part, to word of mouth. That’s an especially impressive take for what is essentially a mid-budget adult drama, the kind of film Hollywood had allegedly stopped making even in 2004. It’s all the more impressive for a movie whose development history began with every financier in America and Canada turning it down —and later, one imagines, regretting that decision.

When you add those Academy Awards to the mix (wins for editing, original screenplay and picture; nominations for Dillon as supporting actor, Haggis’s direction, and Bird York’s song “In the Deep”), Crash seems like a respected and fondly remembered movie, if not a universally beloved one. But that would be a surprise to anyone who’s gotten into an argument about the movie since its release 15 years ago this week. Its reputation has been nothing if not fraught.

Even the Academy doesn’t stand by the film anymore. In 2015, a Hollywood Reporter poll of “hundreds” of Academy members showed that, were they voting in 2015, the 2005 best-picture trophy would have gone to that year’s ostensibly more progressive choice: Ang Lee’s gay cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain . (I take that poll with a grain of salt, by the way, because the Academy grows its membership yearly and gradually becomes a different voting body.) Haggis himself doesn’t necessarily back the criticisms, but he has conceded that his directorial debut shouldn’t have won. “Was it the best film of the year? I don’t think so,” he told Hitfix, now Uproxx, in 2015 . “There were great films that year. Good Night, and Good Luck —amazing film. Capote —terrific film. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain , great film. And [Steven] Spielberg’s Munich . I mean, please, what a year.”

Public opinion is a wild, vacillating, highly contingent thing, and history’s winners get the strictest scrutiny. It’s pretty easy to imagine a world in which Crash didn’t beat Brokeback for best picture, and was instead consigned to that annually enlarged list of Oscar nominees few of us think about post-Oscars—and even fewer of us can recall seeing, even if we liked them at the time. (I’d name names but, to my point, I don’t remember them.) It’s easy too to imagine a world in which Crash won in a lower-stakes fight and didn’t have to bear the overwrought social implications of its win over “the gay cowboy movie.” Crash versus Argo ? That would have been another Oscar year.

In that alternative universe, would Crash still have been ranked 90 (out of 92) on Vulture’s recent ranking of every best-picture winner ? (How it ranked below Out of Africa —which is worse if only because it’s so dehumanizingly boring —is beyond me.) Without the misbegotten Oscar fanfare and subsequent public discourse to fan him on, would Ta-Nehisi Coates still have called Crash “the worst movie of the decade” ? Would an anniversary of the movie’s release even merit attention?

I vote no. Bad movies happen to good people every week, to the Academy every year, and to me practically every day. Nevertheless, we persist. I would sooner say Crash is a gratingly mediocre movie than an irredeemably bad one. Actually, I would sooner say nothing at all, because, in truth, Crash is a movie that I almost never think about.

Rewatching it recently, though, brought me back—back to the sound of Cheadle intoning, in the film’s opening moments, that sometimes people crash into each other to feel connection. (This is his daring philosophical insight into the vehicular incident he survived just moments before.) Back to the audio-visual stench of the film’s broad moral posturing, every one of its scenes an excuse for discourse on the film’s prevailing themes, which get stuffed into the mouths of people whose problems—bad-faith political maneuvering, colorism, sexual assault—are more real than even this movie seems to realize. Back to the sight—the truly splendid, shocking sight—of Sandra Bullock being pushed down the stairs by a screenplay, for no better reason than to engineer an astonishing closing line to the Latina maid who saves her, though she’s never before treated her maid like a person: “You’re the best friend I’ve got.” A better movie would have known that this is a laugh line.

None of this obscures the reasons Crash won best picture, which to me have never really been so obscure. Utter shock at its win, which apparently persists to the present, overlooks the hints scattered among the tea leaves.

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True, Haggis’s movie was only the second film to win best picture at the Oscars without having been nominated in either best-picture category at the Golden Globes. Yet it did win outstanding performance from a cast at the SAG Awards, the closest category the acting guild has to a “best picture” and, importantly, a not-unreliable indicator that a film has momentum. (See also: Shakespeare in Love triumphing over Saving Private Ryan at the SAGs before it clobbered the Spielberg favorite at the Oscars .) And despite its lack of love from the Golden Globes, Haggis’s film did get a best-picture nod overseas, from the BAFTAs, where it earned a heaping nine nominations overall—more than even Hollywood was willing to throw its way and, perhaps tellingly, just as many nominations as Brokeback .

So why did Crash beat Brokeback on Oscar night? Homophobia has routinely been presented as a viable conclusion, and I don’t doubt that it played a role. But I think Crash won because of what it is, what it does, rather than because of what Brokeback isn’t. In a Vulture oral history from a few years ago , producer Cathy Schulman recounted reading the script for the first time while ignoring her black mailman, who was trying to get her attention. She realized, in that moment, that she was Sandra Bullock: “I’m thinking, I’m a bitch. I’m a racist. I felt guilty. He was just trying to be nice, and I was a bitch! I felt really callous in that moment; I felt the same kind of separation from my fellow human being that was in the script.”

This must be the change in people that Ebert says the film inspired. I wouldn’t call it a change; as world views go, it certainly isn’t inspired. But it’s what I think many people felt, feel, when they watch this movie, which thrives on the chaos of its connections, its eagerness to flip the switch. One moment a black character is righteously sermonizing about the realities of gentrification and white fear; the next, he’s hijacking a car. This is irony befitting satire, but Crash , bless it, plays it straight.

Crash and Brokeback seem to represent opposite poles on the limited spectrum of Hollywood progressivism. Neither is as radical as its defenders would claim, just as Hollywood progressivism isn’t nearly as liberal, really, as its proponents would claim. But Brokeback , at least, was a legitimate cultural breakthrough for its time, assuming that we take the Hollywood mainstream and the box office to be the only significant measures of cultural breakthroughs. In the specific and discrete context of capital- H Hollywood, which teemed from the start with gay artists and stars and yet has very rarely taken queerness on as a mainstream subject, Brokeback is a watershed. If we look beyond Hollywood to the long history of queer and more often than not underground films, two gay cowboys spit-lubing in a camping tent is probably more comfortably labeled “pulp” than progressivism. It’s old news.

But Brokeback , with its high-profile director and stars and its legitimate box office success, got more eyes on the issue than those more radical works (whose audiences were smaller because they were more political)—and did more, in a country that had yet to even sanction gay marriage, to normalize what had so often been marginalized in American media. It didn’t need to win best picture for this material impact to be notable. Its box office receipts handled that well enough on their own, opening the door to more projects in a similar vein and a noticeable mainstreaming of LGBT—or at least LG—culture.

The Academy was expected to prove, for its own sake, that it was willing to play a decisive part in that normalization. Instead, it chose Crash —the less-progressive candidate, you could say. Both movies are ultimately efforts to humanize. Both do so familiarly. Brokeback , for example, is a romance rendered impossible by social circumstance: a very legible, often engaging premise for a movie. And Crash , for all its interweaving and cross-cutting and climactic spiritualism, is a throwback to a familiar strain of Oscar-friendly, liberal message movie—in which the “message,” often, is that people are complicated, goodness is relative, and evil is not a terminal condition. It dramatizes racism the same way that classical Hollywood storytelling has long dramatized things: through a sense of character and intention and a guise of psychological realism, through arcs and archetypes, through a slow climb toward third-act revelations about who people really are as evinced by the things they’ve achieved, the changes they’ve undergone by film’s end.

In Crash and in the movies of its ilk, social ills are all interpersonal and individual—not systemic. Most importantly, they’re not insurmountable, as films like American History X , with its tale of a neo-Nazi murderer turning a new leaf in prison, have labored to suggest. When Crash does get systemic—when, for example, a black police chief decides to overlook a complaint about misconduct against Dillon’s cop with a “poor me” speech about the sacrifices he had to make to become a black police chief—it gets goofy.

In films like Crash , racism isn’t a matter of who you are , what you believe, or how you fundamentally understand the world. You aren’t racist, even if you do racist things —because you could just as well learn to do better. Like Dillon’s cop saving a black woman he’d previously assaulted from a fiery blaze, you could have that racism overridden by more virtuous instincts. Because people, you’ll recall, crash into each other .

It isn’t always clear, in Crash and other less-than-great message movies, how the prejudicial social systems that encourage these collisions and make them inevitable, intractable, and oft-repeated fit into this equation. Nor do these films always own up to the unsubtle defensiveness of their position. Someone, somewhere apparently said that racist cops can’t also care for their dying fathers, or that rich white women can’t also be legitimately shaken after a carjacking. Someone apparently said that racist people are just racist—not people—so that the addition of a few human qualities, like fear or paternal love, can seem like dramatic complication.

None of that scans, really. Yet I remain unconvinced that we should care so much—that every time a Green Book triumphs , we have to invoke the Crash controversy.

There’s a character in Haggis’s film, played by Ludacris, who comes off like a white screenwriter’s attempt to “do Spike Lee. ” Thankfully, I have Spike Lee’s actual movies to turn to instead. Sandra Bullock’s entitled, prejudiced politician’s wife isn’t endemic to Crash , either; melodramas, especially from the age of the “women’s picture,” have plenty to say about the prejudicial undercurrents of white domestic life. So, again: I’m all set. The inclination, 15 years after its release, is to assume that Crash ’s win matters. Really, as with most things, it only matters as much as we let it.

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FILM REVIEW

Bigotry as the Outer Side of Inner Angst

By A.o. Scott

• May 6, 2005

What kind of movie is "Crash"? It belongs to a genre that has been flourishing in recent years -- at least in the esteem of critics -- but that still lacks a name. A provisional list of examples might include "Monster's Ball," "House of Sand and Fog" and "21 Grams." In each of these films, as in "Crash," Americans from radically different backgrounds are brought together by a grim serendipity that forces them, or at least the audience, to acknowledge their essential connectedness.

The look of these movies and the rough authenticity of their locations create an atmosphere of naturalism that is meant to give force to their rigorously pessimistic view of American life. The performances, often by some of the finest screen actors working today, have the dense texture and sober discipline that we associate with realism. But to classify these movies as realistic would be misleading, as the stories they tell are, in nearly every respect, preposterous, and they tend to be governed less by the spirit of observation than by superstition.

This is not necessarily bad, and some of these movies are very good indeed. But in approaching "Crash," we should be more than usually cautious about mistaking its inhabitants -- residents of Los Angeles of various hues, temperaments and occupations -- for actual human beings. This may not be easy, for they are played by people of such graven, complex individuality as Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle and Terrence Howard, as well as by less established but equally gifted actors like Michael Pena and Chris Bridges (better known to the world by his rap name, Ludacris).

Their characters -- and the dozen or so others whose lives intersect in the course of an exceedingly eventful day and a half -- may have names, addresses, families and jobs, but they are, at bottom, ciphers in an allegorical scheme dreamed up by Paul Haggis, the screenwriter (most recently of Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby"), here making his directorial debut.

As he demonstrated to galvanizing effect in the "Million Dollar Baby" script, Mr. Haggis is not unduly concerned with subtlety. At a time when ambitious movies are dominated by knowing cleverness and showy sensation, he makes a case for blunt, earnest emotion, and shows an admirable willingness to risk sentimentality and cliché in the pursuit of genuine feeling. Many of the scenes in "Crash" unfold with great dramatic power, even when they lack a credible narrative or psychological motive.

Mr. Haggis's evident sincerity and intelligence are reflected in the conviction of the cast, and may also leave an impression on the audience. So much feeling, so much skill, so much seriousness, such an urgent moral agenda -- all of this must surely answer our collective hunger for a good movie, or even a great one, about race and class in a modern American city.

Not even close. "Crash" writes its themes in capital letters -- Race, Class, Life, Fate -- and then makes them the subjects of a series of speeches and the pivot points for a succession of clumsy reversals. The first speech, which doubles as introductory voice-over narration, is by Mr. Cheadle's character, a detective named Graham, addressing his partner (and lover), Ria (Jennifer Esposito), after their car has been in a minor accident. He takes the event as a metaphor for the disjunctive, isolated character of life in Los Angeles, while she insists that it is merely a literal, physical occurrence that requires a practical response.

It does not take long to figure out whose side Mr. Haggis is on. Metaphor hangs in the California air like smog (or like the snow that is incongruously falling on the Hollywood Hills). The other major element in the atmosphere is intolerance. Ria, who is Hispanic, climbs out of the car and confronts the other driver, an Asian-American woman, and before long their argument has descended into racial name-calling. This sets the pattern for just about every other conversation in the movie.

In the next scene, which takes place earlier on the previous day, a hot-tempered Iranian shopkeeper is insulted by the owner of a gun store, who calls him "Osama." And so it goes, slur by slur, until we come full circle, to the original accident, after which a few lingering questions are resolved.

In the meantime, quite a lot happens. Guns are pulled, cars are stolen, children are endangered, cars flip over, and many angry, hurtful words are exchanged, all of it threaded together by Mr. Haggis's quick, emphatic direction and Mark Isham's maundering electronic score.

Mr. Haggis is eager to show the complexities of his many characters, which means that each one will show exactly two sides. A racist white police officer will turn out to be physically courageous and devoted to his ailing father; his sensitive white partner will engage in some deadly racial profiling; a young black man who sees racial profiling everywhere will turn out to be a carjacker; a wealthy, mild-mannered black man will pull out a gun and start screaming. No one is innocent. There's good and bad in everyone. (The exception is Mr. Pena's character, a Mexican-American locksmith who is an island of quiet decency in a sea of howling prejudice and hypocrisy).

That these bromides count as insights may say more about the state of the American civic conversation than about Mr. Haggis's limitations as a storyteller, and there is no doubt that he is trying to dig into the unhappiness and antagonism that often simmer below the placid surface of everyday life. "I'm angry all the time, and I don't know why," says Jean (Sandra Bullock), the wife of the city's district attorney (Brendan Fraser), the day after their S.U.V. has been stolen at gunpoint.

Her condition is all but universal in Mr. Haggis's city, but its avenues of expression are overwrought and implausible. The idea that bigotry is the public face of private unhappiness -- the notion that we lash out at people we don't know as a form of displaced revenge against the more familiar sources of our misery -- is an interesting one, but the failure of "Crash" is that it states its ideas, again and again, without realizing them in coherent dramatic form.

It is at once tangled and threadbare; at times you have trouble keeping track of all the characters, but they run into one another with such frequency that, by the end, you start to think that the population of Los Angeles County must number in the mid-two figures -- all of it strangers who hate one another on sight.

So what kind of a movie is "Crash"? A frustrating movie: full of heart and devoid of life; crudely manipulative when it tries hardest to be subtle; and profoundly complacent in spite of its intention to unsettle and disturb.

"Crash" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has violence, strong language (including many racial slurs) and a brief sex scene.

Crash Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Paul Haggis; written by Mr. Haggis and Bobby Moresco, based on a story by Mr. Haggis; director of photography, J. Michael Muro; edited by Hughes Winborne; music by Mark Isham; production designer, Laurence Bennett; produced by Cathy Schulman, Don Cheadle, Bob Yari, Mark R. Harris, Mr. Moresco and Mr. Haggis; released by Lions Gate Films. Running time: 107 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Sandra Bullock (Jean), Don Cheadle (Graham), Matt Dillon (Officer Ryan), Jennifer Esposito (Ria), Brendan Fraser (Rick), Terrence Howard (Cameron), Chris Bridges (Anthony), Thandie Newton (Christine) and Michael Pena (Daniel).

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The Crash Reviews

Several respectable actors offer dicey performances here, but Rappaport's screenplay is the real villain, expecting thin references to real-world financial peril to paper over gaping holes in credibility and plain-old drama.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2017

Let's just say that Ron Paul supporters will probably embrace The Crash and the theories it comes up with.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 14, 2017

In its strained effort to get your blood boiling, the script trots out trite cliches that diminish the suspense.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2017

Limp financial cyber thriller has lots of strong language.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 13, 2017

These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra's most feverish populist nightmares.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 13, 2017

What is The Crash about? First off, it's about Mr. Rappaport's ability to get his film produced, and hats off to him for that, since it couldn't have made much sense on paper and hasn't grown in coherence on screen.

Full Review | Jan 12, 2017

An intriguing if flawed techno-thriller that gets an effective boost from a high-caliber cast.

The more Rappaport tries to pull urgency out of thin air, the harder the movie flounders, finding its title more descriptive of production ambition than dramatic content.

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jan 12, 2017

The Crash fumbles between bad diatribe and bad domestic drama, complete with subplots about absent parents and childhood cancer.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Jan 12, 2017

Detailed knowledge of the subject and a fine ensemble cast of characters makes for a compelling (albeit wholly fictional) financial thriller.

Full Review | Jan 11, 2017

Too bad The Crash lives up to its inauspicious name.

The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 9, 2017

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Admit It, ‘Crash’ Has Influenced a Generation of Stories About Race

Despite being the subject of ridicule these days, the Best Picture–winning ensemble left a pronounced mark on the way film and television explores race and identity

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Last year, I watched Lovecraft Country , and by the eighth episode, I couldn’t stop thinking about Crash . A few weeks ago, I started watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and the second episode got me thinking about ... Crash . Thirty minutes into Antebellum , I was thinking about Crash . Them ? Crash . Slave Play ? Crash . Boogie ? Crash . Malcolm & Marie ? I see Cameron and Christine from Crash .

There are modern race dramas, such as Get Out and Small Axe , which launch artful interrogations of racial dynamics; and then there are modern race dramas that, in their melodramatic excess, for the most part just remind me of Crash . Despite its dismal reputation these days, Crash may well be the most influential film in my various streaming queues.

Crash tracks more than a dozen characters, intertwined by racialized encounters with each other, for a rough 24 hours in Los Angeles. Crash pits whites, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Iranians in a dog-eat-dog struggle for validation. If only, Crash proposes, these people could slow down and perceive one another beyond the level of stereotype and resentment. Crash isn’t just a movie about race. It’s a movie about pluralism, distinguished—and, I’ll argue, overburdened—by its ensemble structure, designed to cram a wide variety of racial perspective into one potent fable. Director Paul Haggis says he set out to challenge the progressive hypocrisies in pluralist bastions such as Los Angeles. “It was a social experiment,” Haggis told The Huffington Post a few years ago. “I wanted to fuck with people.”

Released in May 2005, Crash cleaned up at the box office, earning nearly $100 million worldwide against a budget of just $6.5 million. It was also a relative critical success, particularly in the eyes of the Academy, which nominated the film for six Oscars, including Best Picture. Crash went on to win that award, in addition to Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. Roger Ebert lauded the movie upon its release. “I don’t expect Crash to work any miracles,” Ebert wrote , “but I believe anyone seeing it is likely to be moved to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves.” But a curious development happened over time: Crash encountered critical backlash. “I’ve never actively hated a movie as much as Crash ,” Gene Demby wrote in one retrospective. “Its basic premise seems to be that personal animus is the well from which racism springs, and that absolution from racism can be found in being violently forced to relinquish one’s bitterness.” Ta-Nehisi Coates described the movie and its great acclaim as “the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism.”

In the 16 years since the release of Crash , the U.S. has rushed through a series of milestones in race relations: a Black president, a new chapter in the civil rights movement, a white backlash, a U.S.-Mexico border wall, and now a national uptick in violence against Asian Americans. Hollywood has answered these shifts with new, hard-sought commitments to diversified casting and diversified stories. I never thought I’d live to see Warner Bros. distributing a star-studded movie about Fred Hampton. Now Crash stands—and decays—as a monument to a previous, naive phase. But more than any other movie about race, Crash has left a deep and abiding impression on big-budget entertainment with anti-racist convictions. With each passing year, Crash seems a bit more ridiculous in hindsight, and yet new dramas seem nonetheless determined to propagate the movie’s worst faults.

For its first 30 minutes or so, Crash introduces the many stereotypes that overpopulate the movie: the bigoted white police sergeant, John (Matt Dillon), and his naive junior partner, Tom (Ryan Phillippe); the Black carjackers, Anthony (Ludacris) and Peter (Larenz Tate); the fearful white socialite, Jean (Sandra Bullock); the light-skinned Black Hollywood couple, Cameron (Terrence Howard) and Christine (Thandiwe Newton); the tattooed Latino locksmith, Daniel (Michael Peña); and several others. Gradually, Crash subverts and reforms the stereotypes, the characters forced to confront each other in situations that put their prejudices to the test. Race is, by design, Haggis’s one and only idea about any of these characters. Crash betrays its heartfelt performances and some clever character drama with ridiculous contrivances to raise racial tension—the one and only motivation for anything—in every character arc. Take, for instance, Graham (Don Cheadle) and Ria (Jennifer Esposito), two police colleagues engaged in an affair. They’re having sex when Graham takes a phone call from his mother. Graham, a Black man, then cuts the call short by telling his mother, “I’m having sex with a white woman,” before hanging up. Ria, who is Puerto Rican and Salvadoran, objects to being described as a white woman. Graham then jokingly regards Ria as Mexican and wonders why Mexicans park their cars on their lawns.

In interviews, Haggis gets very defensive about this particular scene. He says he intended the race humor in the earlier parts of the movie to disarm the audience and sow misdirection about the movie’s dramatic bearings. It makes sense on a conceptual level. But what is this scene? Was there really no better way to introduce Graham’s mother while raising the racial tension in Graham and Ria’s relationship? Crash , at every turn, veers toward absurdity in order to illustrate bigotry—a substance that’s often a lot more variable and nuanced than the characters in this movie.

Cameron and Christine in particular resemble the couple in Malcolm & Marie , starring John David Washington and Zendaya. In the movie, Malcolm and Marie have an overwrought argument about racial condescension in film criticism, and they never seem to have a genuine romance so much as they have an ugly, running discourse. Malcolm and Marie’s clashes more or less resemble the moment when Cameron and Christine turn on each other, in a vindictive argument about assimilation, after John profiles Cameron and sexually assaults Christine at a traffic stop. That particular excess in Crash —John sexually assaulting Christine—gets me thinking about Antebellum , starring Janelle Monáe. Antebellum follows Black captives on a remote plantation run by violent white Confederate antebellum reenactors, including a man who repeatedly rapes Monáe’s character, Eden. This is all in service of some wildly overstated point about how much hasn’t changed in Black-white relations (since slavery).

Even the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gotten a bit busy and ridiculous in its characterization of racial strife. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier pairs Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) in a buddy-dramedy struggle to succeed the retired Captain America. Naturally, Sam succeeding Captain America would stir some tension; Sam is Black, and Captain America, played by Chris Evans in the movies, isn’t just white. He is, or seems, prohibitively white. Here you have the basis for some decent race drama. But then The Falcon and the Winter Soldier lurches to tedious extremes. A bank denies Sam’s application for a home loan, a commentary on disparities and discrimination in lending. Sam and Bucky meet Isaiah Bradley, a disgruntled Black veteran of the Korean War, and his backstory turns out to be a commentary on the Tuskegee Study. Moments later, the police profile Sam as a potential criminal nuisance to Bucky. Taken individually these are sensible bits of racialized drama. But taken all together, and lacking any coherence or depth, they suggest there’s a cringeworthy shortcut being taken in a show that’s otherwise about a robot bird man and his grunge sidekick.

Among the many characters in Crash , Jean seems truest to Haggis’s mission “to bust liberals.” She’s also one of the more sensible characterizations in this largely senseless movie. She’s a wealthy, white woman who second-guesses her prejudices in the moment before the carjacking and then resents her hesitation after the fact. Jean sulks at home, ragging on her housekeeper, Maria, until the larger truth dawns on her in a dour phone conversation with a friend. “I am angry all the time,” Jean says, “and I don’t know why.” Otherwise, Crash employs a certain bluntness, verging on cartoonishness, in announcing each character’s prejudices despite the supposed sophistication of the more progressive characters, and often in wildly incongruous contexts. The very worst case is Tom. He spends the whole movie disgusted with John’s stereotyping before risking his life and career to make amends with Cameron, only to transform into a vengeful redneck blasting country music as soon as the hitchhiking Peter settles into his car in the final act. Who is this character and where did he come from all of a sudden? He seems born from Haggis’s inability to translate the variety of his cast into a variety of characterizations.

There’s one recent example that struck me as the most reprehensible fiction I’ve seen in a while. Lovecraft Country stages its eighth episode, “Jig-a-Bobo,” during the mourning for Emmett Till. The mourning brings two characters, the Black woman Ruby and the white woman Christina, into a bizarre, anachronistic confrontation about white fragility. It culminates with Christina hiring two men—no, I’m not making this up—to reenact Till’s murder on her. This isn’t a brave racial reckoning nor a subversive character drama. This is Crash .

I don’t even hate these things. The several episodes of Lovecraft Country before “Jig-a-Bobo” are great! But I fear a generation of storytellers who should know better—the sort of storytellers who would happily ridicule Crash— have learned all the wrong lessons from this ludicrous movie. Crash used bigotry as a shortcut. Whatever strong feelings you might have about the characters (as thin as they are) are for the most part due to their situation in a larger racial conflict. It’s certainly not due to the artful particulars of their character development. There’s only one great scene—well, apart from all the great scenes with Anthony and Peter together—in Crash . It’s a scene I mentioned earlier, and it’s the simplest scene in the movie: Jean at home alone, pacing her bedroom, venting on the phone to her friend, saying, “I am angry all the time, and I don’t know why.” It’s a modest, but poignant resolution for a character who can learn and grow only so much in a story spanning 24 hours. It’s a small truth with real insight into the nature of prejudice at the personal level. But no one remembers this scene. They remember the goofiest, melodramatic moments in Crash . They remember the cringe. And it shows.

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Content Caution

In Theaters

• Don Cheadle as Graham; Matt Dillon as Officer Ryan; Sandra Bullock as Jean; Jennifer Esposito as Ria; William Fichtner as Flanagan; Brendan Fraser as Rick; Michael Peña as Daniel; Terrence Dashon Howard as Cameron; Ludacris as Anthony; Thandie Newton as Christine; Ryan Phillippe as Officer Hanson; Larenz Tate as Peter

Home Release Date

• Paul Haggis

Distributor

Movie review.

In L.A., nobody touches anybody else anymore. So begins a story that is certain to touch moviegoers in a way they’re not used to being touched. With the ethnically diverse yet deeply divided Los Angeles as its setting, Crash tackles the sensitive subject of racism head-on by intertwining the stories of a litany of people from both sides of the proverbial tracks.

Graham is a police detective. Jean is a district attorney’s wife. Officer Ryan is a veteran cop; Hanson is his rookie partner. Daniel is a locksmith. Flanagan is a television director, and Christine is his wife. Character after character is introduced … many of whom will intersect—and crash into each other—at some point in a 36-hour period. But while we quickly learn what these people do , what’s more important in this movie is who they are —or more specifically, what race they are. Because in Crash , race is everything .

Positive Elements

As a character-driven story, Crash adeptly explores multifaceted individuals—people who are simultaneously heroes and villains, courageous and spineless. Virtually every individual highlighted has both redeeming and contemptible moments. The white Officer Ryan, for example, is overtly racist, and he breaks the law while on duty. It’s easy to despise him. Yet in several scenes we see another side of this tragic, misguided character as he expresses compassion for his cancer-stricken father. And we also witness him risking his life to save a black woman.

Officer Hanson rounds out the good-cop, bad-cop part of the story by repeatedly trying to help people. He sticks up for Flanagan in a tense standoff with police, keeping the frazzled director from getting shot. He later picks up a stranger in need.

Elsewhere, a carjacker frees a group of enslaved immigrants. Jean realizes how valuable her relationship with her oft-abused housekeeper really is. And Daniel gently—and creatively—teaches his 5-year-old daughter that she can face the world without fear. There is an abundance of positive “walk-away” value in this film as it relates to race relations (but it’s complicated and sometimes obscured by other content; I’ll explore that more in the “Conclusion”).

Spiritual Elements

A carjacker insists on placing a figurine of St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, on the dashboard of any car he’s riding in, which prompts his partner to ask if he’s heard from God lately. (His pal also refers to the statue as “that voodoo thing.”) A father comforts his young daughter by telling her a story about a fairy coming to visit him. The girl is later described by another man as an “angel who came to protect me.” It’s mentioned that Flanagan is Buddhist. Set during Christmastime, the movie shows a couple of nativity scenes.

Sexual Content

Before Graham and his female companion are interrupted during sex, we hear their moans, and we’re exposed to a full-body shot of the two in a sexual position. (Her bare breasts get screen time, as does his backside.) After getting out of bed, she makes a crude joke about masturbation. And he speaks bluntly of the incident to his mother on the phone.

In a disturbing and drawn-out scenario, Officer Ryan stops Flanagan and Christine in their SUV, asks them to step out of the vehicle and then proceeds to fondle Christine (even running his hands up under her dress) in front of her detained husband. As the camera zooms in, the officer makes several crude remarks about the wife giving her husband oral sex. Christine lets fly more than a few obscene words, too. The scene is verbally rehashed later by Flanagan and Christine, with Christine using the f-word and other vulgar terms to chastise her husband for not intervening.

A large painting of an artistically rendered, fully naked woman hangs in the background of one scene.

Violent Content

Two carjackers run over a man. Though the impact isn’t shown, we hear its sound, and then the victim groaning. The offending pair carry on a lengthy discussion about whether they should leave the man under their truck, or pull him out. (They pull him out and drop him off—literally—at a hospital. Before it’s all over, the camera gets a pretty good look at his grisly wounds.

Guns appear in what seems like every other scene, though few are fired. We do see, however, a boy getting shot from close range; blood drips from his mouth. Several people are held at gunpoint, including one incident involving a child, who is shot at.

Fire engulfs an overturned vehicle while its driver and her rescuer are still trapped inside. A woman at the scene is shown with blood on her head. Flanagan fights with a carjacker while another crook threatens to shoot him. A Persian shopkeeper’s store gets trashed, and racist graffiti is written on the walls (it’s illegible for movie viewers). Jean falls down a flight of stairs.

Crude or Profane Language

Like the rapid-fire shots of a drive-by, the f-word is sprayed about 100 times (several times it’s used with “mother”; it’s also used in a sexual manner). The s-word is said at least a dozen times, while God’s name is misused almost as frequently and is often combined with “d–n.” Christ’s name gets abused four times. More than 30 other milder profanities further mar this film, including several sexual slang terms.

Crash includes many racial epithets. Whites, blacks, Mexicans, Chinese, Arabs, Koreans … no one gets left out on this parade of racially offensive language. The movie attempts to make a point about how frequently we differentiate others based solely on racial descriptions, as when two black carjackers argue about calling each other “n-ggers.” Or when Persians are called Arab “terrorists.” Or when a Latina has to explain to the man she’s sleeping with the difference between Mexicans and South Americans.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Several people smoke cigarettes, including Graham, who says twice that he’s trying to quit. It’s insinuated that a detective was involved in a drug ring. Graham says the man was “coked up out his head” when he was shot dead. Christine is intoxicated during a night full of confrontations.

Other Negative Elements

As stated earlier, Crash excels at delving into the lives of exceedingly complex, and many times morally confused characters. This is a story in which good guys make more bad decisions than bad guys and bad guys sometimes outshine the good. Also, justice is rarely served. Two murderers walk away free while expressing no remorse. Given the chance to stand up for what’s right, Graham (one of the good guys) decides to stay quiet and allows a potentially innocent man to be cast off as a repeat offender.

Officer Ryan embodies everything a cop shouldn’t be. After 17 years on the force, he’s become renown for using his authority to intimidate and mishandle blacks—and yet he continues to get away with it. Graham lies. The Persian shop owner seeks lethal revenge. Jean directs her rage at everyone within reach.

In his motion picture directorial debut, Paul Haggis (who wrote the screenplay for the controversial Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby ) is wasting no time in stirring up the waters. Crash is a riveting, provocative and well-executed movie. Its actors put in first-class performances. Its photography is seamless. And despite the barrage of tragic characters and situations, it retains an odd sense of beauty. But it’s obvious that Haggis’ intent was not just for people to revere his artistry. Crash is as much about what’s off the screen than what’s on it. The movie’s gritty —and I can’t put too much emphasis on that word—take on urban racism is sure to stir up plenty of discussion. So, let’s talk. …

I grew up a minority in about as ethnically diverse a city as they come—Hong Kong. To give you an indication of how blended the society was, my elementary and high schools included students from more than 40 nationalities. I can’t recall a single time in which I was surrounded entirely by a group of people who looked like me. Diversity was simply a given in life.

But even in such a hodgepodge setting, racism existed. There was always someone “lower” on the totem pole, no matter who you were—someone who mustered up feelings of fear, aggression, protectiveness, intrigue, pity, compassion … the list is endless as to how we respond to our own racial prejudices. Sure, many of us have been taught to not stereotype others, yet it’s obvious that in this nation—and in many others as well—we still have more than just a few inches to go.

Haggis would argue we have miles to go. Based on his characters in Crash , we are a people utterly incapable of seeing anyone without stereotypical filters. Race colors our every decision. By focusing so exclusively on people who are each racist in some regard, the director creates a powder keg society that’s oversaturated in racial hyper-sensitivity.

In fact, if everyone in the real L.A. thought and acted like its onscreen denizens do, the City of Angels would’ve been blown sky-high a long time ago. So clearly, Haggis is sensationalizing racism for the sake of making a point. What that point is, though, is open to a great deal of interpretation.

One critic, Josh Bell from the Las Vegas Weekly , writes that “by attempting to say everything about race, Haggis ultimately says nothing.” I don’t believe Crash says nothing . As I left the theater and saw the assortment of people walking, standing, living around me, I was more aware of my own preconceived notions of others. But I was also aware of the ultra-thick layer of grimy material I had just waded through to be reminded of this simple notion: We’re all different; we’re all the same; and we all need each other. At the risk of sounding trite, I could’ve watched Sesame Street to tell me that.

Marcus Yoars

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Crash review – Cronenberg's auto eroticism still has impact

The controversy surrounding the original release of this dark exploration of sexy car accidents now seems quaintly outdated – but the film holds up well

I n 1996, David Cronenberg ’s movie Crash, now rereleased in 4K digital, became the subject of the last great “banning” controversy for a new film in Britain. His vision of the erotic car crash got brimstone denunciations from the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail. This delayed its BBFC certificate, and Westminster council issued a solemn edict forbidding it in West End cinemas.

But in the 21st century, the press appetite for denouncing shocking films just seemed to vanish, overnight becoming the quaint tradition of a bygone age, perhaps because of a belated realisation that these campaigns were destined to fail and didn’t sell papers, and that, increasingly, nothing sold papers in any case as newsprint lost ground to the internet’s oceanic swell, in which all these films could easily be found. Even The Human Centipede sequel’s brief failure to get a certificate was a formality, laughed or shrugged at. The urge to censor or cancel – as with, say, Maïmouna Dourcouré’s Cuties – has migrated to social media, but even this seems to have no bearing on seeing controversial films if you want.

The controversy has aged badly, but Crash itself holds up well. It isn’t Cronenberg’s best work and can’t reproduce the icily macabre chill of JG Ballard’s prose in the original 1973 novel . There is no walk-on role for Elizabeth Taylor as there is in the book and it’s a shame the soundtrack couldn’t have used the great pop single, inspired by Crash – Warm Leatherette, recorded by the Normal in 1978 (“Hear the crashing steel / Feel the steering wheel”). But it is still deeply strange and risky; particularly, it risks being laughed at, and there is a definite, tiny grain of Razzie absurdity that is a part of its weirdly hypnotic high-porn torpor.

James Spader plays the drolly named James Ballard, a film director in a jaded open relationship with his partner Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger). After a near-fatal car crash close to the airport, Ballard meets the beautiful survivor from the other car in hospital: Helen, played by Holly Hunter . He also encounters a man called Vaughan (Elias Koteas) who is photographing their grisly wounds. Vaughan introduces them to his cult, which celebrates the eroticism of car crashes, and for a crowd of devotees he stages pornified drag-race events on quiet roads: secret Hollywood-Babylon-type re-enactments of famous car wrecks that killed people such as James Dean and Jayne Mansfield. Vaughan presides over a sexual black mass that fetishises the victims’ wounds, their calipers, bandages and surgical stitches and imagines them as part of the crushed metal of the doomed cars. Ballard, Helen and Catherine become increasingly obsessed with the sexual thrill of the car crash.

Being in that initial wreck is for Ballard the equivalent of being bitten by a radioactive spider. Now he (like others) is granted the perv superpower of seeing the sensuality of technology, and especially the dark ecstasy of seeing sleek technology go haywire, seeing how the human form fuses with this futurist world of glass and metal and gasoline in the act of crashing. (I found myself thinking of the Hammer House of Horror TV episode called The Thirteenth Reunion from 1980, about people whose behaviour is shaped by having been passengers together in a plane crash.)

Crash is still creepy, still menacing, still hypnotic, and it is still dedicated, in its freaky way, to the ideal of eroticism, to just drifting from erotic scene to erotic scene without much need for story. But Crash is no longer so contemporary. Even in the late 90s, it didn’t quite have the zeitgeisty charge of the book, which had come out 20 years previously. Cars themselves (and certainly airports) aren’t really as sexy and urgent as they could plausibly be presented by Ballard, as part of his eerily disquieting atrocity exhibition of modern life. Cars themselves have become far more boring and reliable and safe in our culture. Nowadays, the airbag of banality is deployed.

Interestingly, Ben Wheatley’s movie version of Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise , about the psychopathology of living in a tall building (a cousin to Crash), sees it more as a period piece, a surreal twist on 70s design that is very strange, very Sanderson. Maybe that is how any new adaptation of Crash would have to work. But Cronenberg’s film still has a metal-crunching impact.

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Megalopolis, Cannes review: Francis Ford Coppola’s $120m self-funded epic is no car crash

Adam driver, aubrey plaza and a cross-dressing shia labeouf are among the many stars giving quite mannered performances in this eagerly anticipated and deeply flawed sci-fi spectacle, article bookmarked.

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Megalopolis , Francis Ford Coppola’s self-funded $120m (£94m) epic , certainly isn’t another Godfather or Apocalypse Now , but it’s at least bursting with ideas. Anticipation was high ahead of its Cannes premiere on Thursday night. The filmmaker spent decades trying to get Megalopolis off the ground. What if it was no good? And what to make of the recent claims of chaos on its set ? Ultimately, this isn’t the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric.

The setting is a futuristic New York bearing echoes of ancient Rome. The city is close to bankruptcy under its corrupt mayor, Giancarlo Esposito’s Cicero, but its rich young things don’t seem to care – they exist hedonistically, partying like there’s no tomorrow. Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), meanwhile, is a Nobel prize-winning architect, physicist and all-round visionary. His lover Wow Platinum, a go-getting journalist played by Aubrey Plaza in full, pouting Marilyn Monroe mode, describes him as “handsome, wacko and anal as hell” – Driver plays him like a more cerebral Bruce Wayne.

Cesar has discovered a mysterious – and never fully explained – new substance called “megalon”. Detesting Cicero and eager to sweep him from office, he hopes to use “megalon” to build “a city people can dream about”. Complicating matters is Cicero’s precocious daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who falls in love with Cesar, while his many enemies plot to bring him down.

Megalopolis is full of bizarre moments. At one point Cesar suddenly recites Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy. In another, Jon Voight – playing a sleazy banker – shoots a rival in the buttocks with a golden arrow. Orgiastic early nightclub scenes rekindle memories of Tinto Brass’s Caligula . There’s a nod, too, to the Godfather movies in a cleverly choreographed assassination scene.

However, Coppola’s stylised and theatrical storytelling doesn’t do his actors any favours. He’s drawn together some very big names, but most give mannered and occasionally throwaway performances. Dustin Hoffman pops up as one of Cicero’s fixers, but is given little to say or do. Coppola’s sister Talia Shire and nephew Jason Schwartzman appear briefly. Shia LaBeouf, at least, is very good value as Cesar’s cross-dressing, power-hungry cousin – his work here certainly isn’t subtle, but it’s at least energetic. Laurence Fishburne lends a little gravitas, too, as Cesar’s devoted driver and assistant. He’s also the film’s narrator, providing earnest commentary that helps bridge gaps between the haphazard plotting.

Visually, Megalopolis is often dazzling. Skyscrapers are shown in golden-hued light, while the film’s futuristic cityscape rekindles memories of Fritz Lang’s silent era classic Metropolis , as well as those playfully kitsch fantasies that French film pioneer Georges Melies used to turn out in the early days of cinema. Coppola is also making plenty of well-observed points about the “broken” US political system, and the media’s voracious appetite for scandal.

You can’t help but marvel at his gumption (and folly) in making a blockbuster in which town planning features so prominently, and characters quote ancient philosophers like Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius at length. Box office prospects for Megalopolis look wretched (it also remains without a US distributor), though it will be no surprise at all if the film achieves cult status by dint of its wondrous oddity.

Dir: Francis Ford Coppola. Starring: Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman. 138 mins.

‘Megalopolis’ is awaiting UK release

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Chris Cooley's film review of Commanders' DT Johnny Newton

Chris Cooley praised the Commanders' selection of Johnny Newton, but also offered a few concerns.

The former Washington tight end, who appeared on Thursday's "Kevin Sheehan Show" podcast, expressed his film observations of Newton.

Not to be overlooked, Sheehan proposed that other teams possibly knew of Newton's injury and that the Commanders did not. Newton fell into the second round, and Commanders GM Adam Peters was in disbelief Newton was still available at No. 36, where Peters selected him.

Here are a few selected quotes from Cooley's review:

"He is a consistently productive guy," Cooley said. "Four blocked kicks at Illinois. I love a dude that can block kicks! There is a knack to it."

"He is a compact 6'2", 304 pounds...He is not thin."

" First team All-American . He wrecked Maryland; he wrecked Wisconsin. He can wreck a game. There is no doubt about it; he can play in the backfield."

"He will come off the ball, quick twitch, and he can transition from speed to power. He can play inside; he can play nose. Quick hands, quick feet. When you are playing against Johnny Newton on the other side of the ball, you are worried he is going to beat you right now."

"His hand-fighting is excellent. He will battle through that and get off of stuff."

"I think when he wants to, he can crash back-side run plays really well."

"He has great pass-rush moves; his high end is really high end."

"I think the number one negative I see is he picks and chooses. There are times you can write L-A-Z-Y...It's not that he can't run down the line of scrimmage. It's not that he can't chase the ball carrier. It's not that he doesn't do that. He just picks and chooses."

"He's a guy you want to make sure is always going; you got to make sure he is always rolling or have him out."

"His pad level is not very good. He plays upright; he plays high."

"He plays around blocks as well, which you can't get away with in the NFL."

"Honestly, I think he is a great pick. He is going to be around a couple of defensive tackles (Jonathan Allen, Daron Payne) who will not accept anything but "go" all the time. I think it will be a really good fit for him."

"There are a couple of concerns, but so much positive to him, so much upside to him."

This article originally appeared on Commanders Wire: Chris Cooley's film review of Commanders' DT Johnny Newton

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‘Motel Destino’ Review: Sex and Nihilism All the Time in Karim Aïnouz’s Neon Collision of ‘Crash’ and ‘Body Heat’

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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After an epilepsy warning that turns out to be very necessary given the flashing, thumping lighting — as if Aïnouz is taking a blacklight to human sexuality and distorting it even more — to come, the film opens on 22-year-old Heraldo (Iago Xavier) and his brother. They live along the Atlantic Ocean in Brazil’s northeast corner with their criminal family, led by a dowdy matriarch not intent on letting them leave even as Heraldo dreams of starting out on his own elsewhere as a mechanic. But sex, drugs, and other pleasures also interest Heraldo, who goes out clubbing one night and is taken back to the Motel Destino by a woman who leaves him there, stuck with the bill. 

Emerging into the sunlight, Heraldo discovers on his walk of shame that his brother has been killed in a botched robbery attempt. All we see is the brother’s corpse being zipped up into a body bag, Aïnouz not keen on sentimentality at any turn. But Heraldo is haunted by increasingly weird, almost shamanistic visions of his brother and others, like sleep paralysis demons for the spiritually adrift. 

The motel is run by the wild-haired and free-spirited Dayana (Nataly Rocha), who operates the rent-a-room with her gruesome husband, Elias (Fábio Assunção), whom you can tell immediately must be abusive. Rocha and Assunção are the more decorated actors in the trio, both with a wide range of Brazilian film and TV credits, while Xavier was a discovery from more than 500 actors screened to play Heraldo. He has an animal intensity — not to mention an unsmotherable libido as Heraldo and Dayana fast jump into a clandestine extramarital affair. Though how behind-closed-doors can their daily fucking possibly be when each room in the Motel Destino has either a viewing aperture into or a camera turned on it? Meanwhile, the nonstop sounds of sexual moaning, men and women writhing around in pleasure as if in hot mud, suggest there’s not much in the way of privacy here amid round-the-clock fucking and sucking. 

More death starts to wend its way into the hotel. One of the Frenchmen responsible for killing Heraldo’s brother dies of an apparent Viagra overdose, and Heraldo, Dayana, and Elias bury his body in the middle of nowhere, the trouble of dealing with the man’s death the legal way too threatening to the kinky eden they’ve created. If you can call it that. The bordello, fever-dreamed up by Aïnouz with the help of production designer Marcos Pedroso, while all dressed in pink and oranges and blues, each room with its own vibe, is no Madonna Inn. As “Motel Destino” spins deeper toward the drain of darkness, the Motel rather starts to feel like whatever circle of hell is the most sex-crazed. 

Grade: B 

“Motel Destino” premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution. 

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Why Did Tom Hanks' FedEx Plane Crash in Cast Away?

The plane crash in Cast Away is a mystery that's never definitively explained. But could the cause of the accident be hidden in the movie?

• In Cast Away , a sudden plane crash kicks off Chuck Noland's journey to discover fresh hope and the will to survive.
• The cause of the plane crash is never explicitly confirmed in the film, which prefers to focus on Noland's adventure and the theme of self-discovery.
• However, a few key details reveal the true cause of the plane crash in Cast Away .

The 2000 film Cast Away is a riveting tale of a man stranded on a deserted island with nothing but his wits and will to survive. Director Robert Zemeckis lays out the evolution of Tom Hanks' character as he reaches the beach, lost and confused, and leaves it determined and hopeful. It helped the film become a critical and commercial hit, as well as scoring an Oscar nomination for Hanks in one of the better roles of his career. The film even created a small but notable pop-culture icon, Wilson, the volleyball Hanks' character anthropomorphizes to fend off loneliness.

Hanks' Chuck Noland is a FedEx systems engineer devoted to his job and delivering packages on time. However, just before the holidays, he takes a last-minute trip to Malaysia that ends in disaster. While flying through a storm, something happens that causes the plane to crash, leaving Noland as the sole survivor. Even though he survives, the real trick is to continue living on the island he washes ashore. However, while his journey is detailed throughout the film, the cause of the plane crash that strands him is left ambiguous. What happened to the FedEx plane? The film is told almost entirely from Noland's point of view, and he himself is uncertain what happened besides the fact that it ​​​​​​goes down. The other details require a little sleuthing to spot.

Updated by Jordan Iacobucci on May 25, 2024: Almost twenty-five years after its release, Cast Away remains an important part of Tom Hanks's and Robert Zemeckis's shared filmography. This article has been updated with additional info from the film and to meet CBR's updated formatting guidelines.

What Caused the Plane Crash in Cast Away?

Tom hanks' return as woody in toy story 5 seemingly confirmed.

The crash in Cast Away is abrupt to both Tom Hanks's Chuck Noland and the audience. He's seen in the bathroom removing a bandage before a bang decompresses the cabin. The plane entered a violent storm and encountered turbulence, which didn't initially concern him. It's a key moment because it helps the audience identify with him more closely. Most people have been on an airplane when it hits a little turbulence and are invariably informed that it's nothing to worry about.

Noland is no different and even chats amiably with the pilots for a bit before it becomes apparent that something more serious is wrong. Communications have gone down, and the plane is some 200 miles off-course. Noland goes into the bathroom rather than buckling up as the pilots tell him. Shortly thereafter, the plane runs into a serious problem, leaving him to hold on for dear life. It's generally believed the storm caused the accident because the pilots are seemingly lost and without communication.

It makes for a key plot point because it means Noland is unlikely to be rescued if he remains on the island. Although it doesn't happen as often as it used to, plane accidents due to storms still occur, and it's not beyond reason to assume the same happens to Noland. Furthermore, he's sufficiently confused, and the conditions are sufficiently chaotic to hide the true cause. Regardless of the cause, Noland's life is in peril, and he's left stranded with little hope of anyone coming for him. The reason — storm or otherwise — is superfluous to his circumstances.

Mislabeled Materials Caused the Plane Crash in Cast Away

Tom hanks' that thing you do soundtrack gets first vinyl.

However, following Noland's rescue, his ex-wife Kelly explained the storm had nothing to do with the accident. Instead, it was likely caused by potentially mislabeled hazardous material in the cargo hold. While the explanation seems as outlandish as flying through a storm, multiple clues are given throughout the crash scene to help confirm Kelly's explanation. The first occurs right before Chuck's life is turned upside down.

While in the bathroom, audiences hear a bang just before the cabin depressurizes. Although the focus is on Chuck, who is scared and confused about what's happening, it's essential to hear what the pilots say as one reaches Chuck. In the background, one of the pilots yells, "explosion!" Seconds later, he also says a partially muffled line that sounds like "somewhere in the hold," potentially discussing the origins of the accident. This is further justified when Hanks escapes the plane and stares at the plane's wreckage as it sinks.

There's a massive fire and explosion that, while possible due to an engine, is more likely from hazardous materials . It would also result in the decompression the plane experiences while sending it crashing into the sea. The explanation is particularly interesting for off-camera reasons. FedEx is a major corporation . Its business is connected to its ability to get anything anywhere in the world safely and swiftly. If the film's fictional plane crash comes down to the company mishandling a package or carrying unsafe materials — however inadvertently — it strongly suggests that they're not as safe and reliable as they claim.

Nonetheless, FedEx agreed to put its name and logo on the film, either because they felt the free publicity was worth it (the FedEx logo is front and center much of the time) or because they felt audiences wouldn't associate the company with a fictional plane crash, or because Noland's status as a dedicated and efficient employee offset the negative implications. Whatever the reason, the gamble paid off since the film has aged well and gives the company long-term visibility. But it's enough to leave media-savvy viewers looking to the storm as an explanation rather than a fatal in-universe mistake from FedEx.

Cast Away Uses the Storm as Symbolism

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One of the big reasons the storm looms so large in people's minds is the potent (and overt) symbolism it holds. While the cause of the explosion turns out to be something different, the storm itself is a spot-on representation of a sudden cataclysm. It stresses one of Cast Away's big points: that the comforts of civilization breed complacency , and modern lives can still fall into dire peril through happenstance and fate.

That feeds into another of the film's central themes about how unexpected situations can define a person for the rest of their life. It also reveals to Noland how important it is to live in the moment and to appreciate small victories, such as his successful creation of fire on the island and the one FedEx package he leaves unopened (and ultimately delivers to its intended recipient).

In light of that, the cause of the crash remains irrelevant. Cast Away isn't meant to explore the mysteries of why Noland ends up in his situation. Indeed, had he known for sure why the plane crashed, it would have diminished his experiences on the island and reduced the impact of his slow evolution into a self-sufficient survivor over the next four years. To some extent, the mystery stays with him all that time, leaving him to wonder what happened and find a zen-like peace in understanding that it really doesn't matter.

That being said, for a good story, it's important to give audiences an explanation for certain events. So rather than spend too much time on it, Cast Away puts viewers in Chuck's shoes and provides only information he would hear, leaving the crash loosely ambiguous. That allows the audience to better identify with him as he struggles to survive on the island. The explanation becomes secondary to that journey, and Cast Away is willing to chance a little viewer uncertainty to focus on the protagonist. It arrives organically as part of the story, making it easy to overlook amid the viewers' focus on Noland. In that sense, the obscurity of the explanation for the plane crash proves how well Cast Away adheres to its purpose.

How Does Tom Hanks Escape The Island In Cast Away?

Thankfully, the survival film doesn't end on a note of tragedy but rather a triumph. After four years of isolation, Tom Hanks's Chuck Noland finally manages to escape the island. After discovering a piece of a destroyed porta-potty on the shore, Chuck fashions a makeshift raft and embarks on a daring voyage. Knowing that his best chance at survival is to leave the island, Chuck braves the open waters and sails with his good friend, the volleyball Wilson, toward salvation. However, he is caught in yet another storm, which knocks him into the churning waters.

Without any recourse, Chuck falls victim to the raging sea, losing Wilson in the process. Unable to save his "friend," Chuck is alone in the world once more. However, in a positive twist of fate, Chuck is reduced by a passing cargo ship, which brings him back to civilization. At long last, Chuck's long trial is ended and he returns to his family and friends.

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A FedEx executive undergoes a physical and emotional transformation after crash landing on a deserted island.

Here's When 'The Fall Guy' Crash-Lands Onto Digital

The action rom-com stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.

The Big Picture

• The Fall Guy offers a blend of action, intrigue, and drama, paying tribute to Hollywood's stunt community.
• The film stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt.
• The Fall Guy promises an explosive viewing experience on digital platforms when it arrives on May 21, 2024.

Get ready for a thrill ride as The Fall Guy lands on digital this week, delivering high-octane action directly to your living room. Directed by the master of kinetic cinema, David Leitch ( John Wick , Deadpool 2 ) , the film not only showcases jaw-dropping stunts but also weaves an intriguing tale of conspiracy and survival in the cutthroat world of movie-making, mixed with dashing romance and slapstick humor . The Fall Guy arrives exclusively on digital platforms with a never-before-seen extended cut tomorrow, May 21, 2024.

Available on digital tomorrow, The Fall Guy offers a perfect blend of action, intrigue, and drama . With sequences that push the envelope on stunt choreography and a plot that keeps you guessing, this film is a tribute to the unsung heroes of Hollywood’s stunt community. So settle in for a movie night and prepare to be captivated by one of the year’s most thrilling films, particularly if you've missed out on seeing it on the big screen. The movie grossed $27 million in its first weekend, and added a little over $13 million in its sophomore frame, dropping to number two. Despite underperformance at the box office, the home release will be an action-packed experience, as the extended cut contains an additional 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage featuring more action, more laughs and more stunts.

What is 'The Fall Guy' About?

Starring Ryan Gosling as a seasoned stuntman, the plot thickens when—following an injury that takes him away from his job for a long time—he is drawn back in by the temptation of love and joins the set of his ex-girlfriend's (played by Emily Blunt ) directorial debut—an ambitious action film. Things take a dramatic turn as Gosling's character uncovers a dangerous conspiracy involving the film's lead actor, portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson . As the stunt sequences become real threats, the lines between film set and life-threatening situations blur, making for an exhilarating viewing experience.

The stellar ensemble cast is rounded out by the likes of Hannah Waddingham, Teresa Palmer, Stephanie Hsu , and Winston Duke , all of whom bring their own unique brands of charisma to the movie. Their performances, coupled with Leitch's expert direction, ensure that The Fall Guy is more than just stunt work—it’s a summary, popcorn movie that's the perfect thing to put on at the end of a tough day at work, the kind of old-fashioned movie that people say doesn't get made often enough these days.

'The Fall Guy' Review: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt Lead a Moviemaking Lover’s Dream

Who's behind the stunts in 'the fall guy'.

87North Productions, renowned for their action-packed cinematic projects, brought their signature high-octane style to The Fall Guy . Under the guidance of founders David Leitch and Kelly McCormick , the film showcases a blend of intense stunts and dynamic action sequences that highlight the company’s expertise. Leitch, with his background as a stuntman and action director, ensures that the company's productions often feature complex stunt choreography and innovative action sequences. Known for their work on other action-heavy films like Nobody and Bullet Train , as well as their pioneering work on the John Wick franchise, 87North has continued to push the envelope in action filmmaking, and The Fall Guy serves as another showcase of their commitment to thrilling, stunt-driven stories that leave audiences wowed by the magic of practical effects over CGI-heavy messes.

Whether you're a fan of high-stakes action or character-driven plots, The Fall Guy delivers. Don’t miss your chance to catch this explosive film on your favorite digital and PVOD platforms tomorrow. Stay tuned to Collider for more.

The Fall Guy

Colt Seavers is a stuntman who left the business a year earlier to focus on both his physical and mental health. He's drafted back into service when the star of a mega-budget studio movie, which is being directed by his ex, goes missing.

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Culture Crash: The Composing Genius Of Trent Reznor And Atticus Ross

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'MoviePass, MovieCrash' showcases the catastrophic behind-the-scenes story of the movie-ticket-subscription app

• "MoviePass, MovieCrash" explores the rise and fall of the movie-ticket-subscription company MoviePass.
• It's based on award-winning reporting from Business Insider.
• The documentary debuts May 29 on HBO and Max. Watch the trailer below.

The upcoming HBO documentary "MoviePass, MovieCrash" chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of the movie-ticket-subscription company MoviePass.

After gaining millions of subscribers when the company dropped its monthly price to $10 back in 2017, MoviePass was hyped as the "Netflix for movie theaters," as moviegoers headed to their local cineplexes in droves. But it all turned out too good to be true, as the company burned through hundreds of millions of dollars, eventually going bankrupt in 2020 . (Stacy Spikes, its cofounder, has since relaunched it .)

"MoviePass, MovieCrash," which is based on Business Insider's award-winning reporting , delves into what was happening at the company behind the scenes that led to its downfall, including the ousting of its cofounders, Spikes and Hamet Watt, and the questionable activities by both Mitch Lowe, the company's CEO, and Ted Farnsworth, the head of MoviePass' parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics. (Both Lowe and Farnsworth were charged with securities fraud in 2022 and are awaiting trial.)

"MoviePass, MovieCrash" is directed by Muta'Ali and produced by Assemble Media and Mark Wahlberg's Unrealistic Ideas. It debuts May 29 on HBO and will stream on Max.

Correction: May 16, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated the year that MoviePass went bankrupt. It was 2020, not 2019.

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