People in San Francisco are a few shades more obnoxious than your average idiot. It’s easily the most useless, eyesore-ridden stretch of the downtown area—assuming you ignore everything behind the Greyhound station and the Amtrak depot. I thought the place was hideous back in high school, too, mostly because I couldn't have cared less about my surroundings at the time. Just a bunch of provincial types weeping over some local martyr, while they stayed dead silent when Franjo Harmon isolated all of California and San Francisco. Thank God we’re finally getting some actual improvements around here.
Yeah, let's just hope she doesn't run into that whole "sophomore slump" curse after her first big breakout role.
Mescal is such a killer combo—he’s got that edgy, 80s street fighter look, yet carries this earnest, soulful energy. Honestly, I can't say I blame anyone for being obsessed with him.
It’s been a long time—actually, since I saw Blue Is the Warmest Color—since I felt the urge to watch a movie twice in such short succession. It’s even better the second time; you catch all those directorial flourishes and subtle details that slip past you initially, and the emotional gut punch hits three times harder because you already know how the story ends.
The film is a heavy directorial masterpiece—everything just clicks perfectly.
Because I can't stand hypocrisy. If we spent years tearing apart that old guard of directors who basically butchered American cinema throughout the 90s and 00s, then I’m certainly not going to give a pat on the back to the new generation—especially when I'm watching recycled garbage that's just a pale imitation of the very stuff we used to mock. That's my take on Garbura. Richard Castillo15 usually goes on about how much she hates Ogrest, but now she’s defending this? Probably because they’re from the same neighborhood in California—she feels personally attacked, likely because they breathe the same local air. It's nothing more than hometown tribalism. And you—I remember you as a total provocateur, just looking to stir the pot. Fine, call me a hater. If that's what it takes, then I am one—because to me, EEAAO is unwatchable junk, and Garbura is just a soapy, stereotypical picture book of the American working class. If being a hater means saying that, so be it.
Hahahaha, right, in your little universe, anyone who dares to write an honest critique of a bad or mediocre movie is just bitter and unfulfilled. Sorry, Richard Castillo15, I’m done playing that game. I really hope you’re charging those American directors a massive legal retainer—because your motives are beyond me. Uncle is just 100 minutes of adolescent masturbation that actually lowered my IQ by 30 points the moment I stepped out of the theater, and that final scene? Pure cringe—not some provocative, sadistic masterpiece meant to give you chills. Where’s the "bitterness" in that? It’s just a fact. Garbura’s characters are the most stereotypical tropes ever put to film. So what now? Am I supposed to sit there and marvel at the cinematography just to satisfy you?
If I were gay, my heart would have just stopped seeing such an unimaginative worldview from a director this young. Where’s the edge? Where’s the punk spirit? Maybe Ogrest was born this way—sterile, classical, overly earnest—so I get it, but this guy is just some young kid from California who started writing this stuff in his mid-twenties. Look, even P. T. Anderson was acting like he understood life better than Bergman back when he was doing Magnolia, those were the years—but before that, he put out two incredibly vibrant coming-of-age films, and Magnolia is practically a masterpiece despite all the pretension. Maybe this young director should have isolated himself like Anderson did—hide out in a cabin near Otavic or Vrlika, eat some wild mushrooms, snort some coke, and watch the Masked Singer—then maybe the script would actually be radical, I don't know. I just can't stand these movies where a young guy is desperate to prove how serious he is, how "important" his themes are... To me, a script like this is an immediate red flag that they haven't found their own unique voice yet.
Garbura is nothing more than a conventional, stereotypical chamomile—even a washed-up "bolimek" like Sviličić would have managed to squeeze out a shred of nuance or actual innovation from this. I get why people gravitate toward the intimacy and emotion of S. Place—even if half the movie feels like a collection of standard American indie tropes: dry dialogue, occasional petty middle-class boredom, and mediocre acting from the supporting cast—or perhaps they're just enamored by Uncle's technical execution (though let's be honest, the film falls apart after the first third). To me, though, Garbura is just a modernized repetition of the worst elements found in Sviličić’s or Ogrest’s work.
Alright, I’m joining the ranks of the exhausted—tried three times now, barely made it to the 35-minute mark. I see the craft there—solid acting, some clever self-aware genre play—but those gray, static shots? They absolutely kill me. I suspect they were going for that hyper-stimulated brain fog you get from scrolling through Instagram or TikTok—just constant, rapid-fire input where everything is loud and immediate, the stupider and more entertaining it is.
It’s basically Lucrecia Martel meets Lost in Translation.
A brilliant look at how we can never truly—ever—know the full emotional weight our actions or even just our presence leaves on someone else.
The girl was a force, but for me, it’s that silence at the start—when he heads out to the balcony and she’s just lying there in this almost unnatural stillness. It’s such a sharp allegory for how memory works; when you try to reach back, it’s always quiet, and you end up haunted by the most mundane, unremarkable images for the rest of your life...
Honestly, hats off to them. A well-deserved, overlooked masterpiece.
Steven White7 said:So, I managed to catch one of those last screenings down in Washington, D.C., and honestly, I’ve been sitting here just letting my thoughts drift around the implications of it all...
Breaking the fourth wall is such a fascinating, albeit dangerous, gamble, especially when you're dealing with a film that’s this brutally realistic. Honestly, after that hospital sequence, I found myself struggling to trust the movie for a while. Specifically, when the brother showed up at the apartment, I spent the next five minutes sitting there thinking, "Wait, is this just another fabricated moment?" I couldn't shake the feeling that the writer was just pulling a fast one on us—trying to manufacture some sort of redemption arc for the brother within the script just to smooth things over. I don't know if I'm the only one who felt that skepticism creeping in. Look, if you break the fourth wall at the very end of a movie, sure, maybe it works. But doing it early on, while the audience is still trying to wrap their heads around the established rules of the world, feels suspicious to me—even if the scene itself ended up being one of the best moments in the entire film.
I stumbled upon this review that flat-out denies the movie is actually a critique of our institutions. It reminded me of something Jergović wrote once—something along those same lines: Look, calling "S. Place" some kind of critique of the healthcare system—or any other institutional structure for that matter—is just wrong. To suggest that would be an insult to what this movie actually is, or if you really think that, it’s a clear sign you completely missed the point. It’s like looking at "Anna Karenina" and claiming it was written as a scathing indictment of the safety protocols on the Russian imperial railway system. You're missing the forest for the trees. If you actually take a second to look at what’s happening on screen, who is even responsible for the mess? It feels like the movie spends an eternity dwelling on these snapshots of pure laziness, arrogance, and the sheer inhumanity of our institutions, yet it never really offers even a shred of a systemic critique. Instead, it just shows us individuals trying to navigate that broken machine while attempting to be decent human beings. It sounds trivial when you say it out loud, I know, but in a film this relentlessly bleak, that one small, warm gesture from the local cop in Split toward that family... man, it hits you differently. I honestly don't even know where to start with this one, but let's just dive straight into the mess that is Marendu. It’s funny how certain things just stick in your mind, isn't it? I was sitting there the other day, thinking about how much everything changes, yet some things stay stubbornly, frustratingly the same. It reminds me of those long, winding drives through the outskirts of Chicago where you feel like you're stuck in a loop, just circling the same old ideas without ever actually getting anywhere. Anyway, back to the point—Marendu. There's something about the way people talk about it, or rather, the way they *don't* talk about it, that feels off. It's like we're all collectively pretending that the nuances aren't there, which is just lazy, if you ask me. I remember telling an old friend of mine—actually, he's more of an acquaintance now, lives out in Seattle—that if you can't look at something directly, you aren't really seeing it. You're just looking at a shadow. And that's exactly what this feels like. We're squinting at a shadow and calling it reality. It's blunt, it's messy, and frankly, it's exhausting to keep up with the pretense. If we're going to have a conversation about this, let's at least be honest about how ridiculous the whole situation is. No sense in dancing around it. While they’re busy drowning in all that mindless paperwork. Look, if we’re being honest about where everything fell apart, there are really only two massive, systemic failures that stand out to me. First, they completely botched my brother's diagnosis, and second, the hospital staff was so incredibly negligent that they actually let him wander right out the door. Everything else people want to nitpick—the slow, rude clerks at the front desk, some open window in his room—that's just noise. Those are trivialities, little coincidences that don't change the big picture. And honestly, regarding that misdiagnosis? We might not even be able to prove it was wrong yet. They were barely even halfway through the evaluation process; it was his literal first day on the ward, and he had hardly spoken a word to anyone.
By the way, I was just sitting there recently, catching up on some Nolin. Every single time we drift apart, I find myself spiraling back into these same old patterns, staring at the ceiling and wondering how we always end up right back here. It’s like this recurring loop that I can't seem to break, no matter how hard I try to convince myself that things have actually changed. You know, it reminds me of that one summer I spent stuck in Chicago, just waiting for something—anything—to shift, feeling that same heavy sense of inevitability hanging over my head. We go through these cycles where everything feels fine for a while, and then suddenly, the distance starts creeping in again, quiet and persistent, until we're basically strangers sharing the same space. It’s exhausting, honestly. I sit here thinking about all the arguments we've had and all the silences that followed, and it just feels like we're walking in circles, chasing a version of us that doesn't even exist anymore. Every time we part ways, there's this lingering question of whether we're actually moving forward or if we're just stalling for time before the next inevitable crash. Even back in 1994, we were already seeing this casual, almost incidental critique of how our institutions fail the people they’re supposed to protect. Here’s the gist of it: you have this single father who fought early on in the war, but because he wasn't properly logged in the official records, the system basically forgets his sacrifice. So, when he shows up in Washington, D.C., with his young daughter, the bureaucracy treats him like he’s still just a draft eligible recruit. They try to drag him back to the front lines while his little girl is left to fend for herself in the city. What's frustrating is that the movie doesn't even bother to address the fallout of that later on. I keep looking for these patterns because this theme—this systemic negligence—has been baked into the DNA of independent American cinema since the very beginning, yet the depth of the analysis hasn't actually moved an inch forward. It feels stuck. Unless, of course, I’ve somehow missed a film that actually manages to tackle the weight of this problem with any real substance.
It feels like the blame is shifting, isn't it? We used to point fingers at the institutions, but lately, it seems like the weight of responsibility is falling squarely on the family unit instead. It’s a heavy thing to wrap your head around. In this case, they knew exactly what they were dealing with—they knew his skepticism was completely irrational, bordering on the delusional—but instead of standing their ground, they just folded. They swallowed his paranoia about psychiatrists and medical diagnoses whole, letting his fears dictate their actions. And then, because they chose to believe him over the professionals, they deliberately bypassed legal protocols just to haul him off somewhere else. It was a conscious choice to break the law, and in doing so, they basically handed him back the opportunity to attempt suicide all over again. It’s a tragic cycle when the people who are supposed to protect you are the ones who enable the very thing that's destroying you. You know, that specific brand of blatant indifference you see from the receptionists in these movies? It’s not just a cinematic trope; it actually bleeds into the way the author and his mother behave. I remember reading about them waiting for a psychiatrist out in Washington, D.C., sitting there chatting with this woman who had been waiting an entire week just to be seen. Then, when the doctor finally shows up, Lerotić and his mother just cut right to the front of the line, completely bypassing the woman who had been stuck in that waiting room for seven days straight. At first glance, you might find the audacity a little funny, but if you sit with it for a second... it gets a bit darker. I can't say I'm actually blaming them, honestly. When you're suffocating under that kind of pure panic and desperation—and you haven't even had a second to catch your breath or step back to look at the big picture—it’s hard to wonder why people act the way they do. It doesn't surprise me one bit. At the end of the day, it’s just this intense, probably short-sighted, desperate need to protect a brother or a son. And if there's any silver lining to be found here, that's probably it: the core issue isn't some failure of our institutions, but rather just raw, unfiltered care and love. (Though, God help me, I might actually be agreeing with Jergović on that point.)
In the end, maybe there wasn't anything that could have been done at all. There’s this crushing sense of helplessness woven through the whole film. It feels like it was built around that old-school, ritualistic obsession with the number three—you know, the kind of stuff you see in everything from *The Three Little Pigs* to the structure of the *Divine Comedy*, or even that old saying about how God helps on the third attempt. The movie functions like this rigid, predetermined framework where we just watch the protagonist cycle through three suicide attempts until the third one finally sticks. It’s like fate has already made up its mind, and the characters are just helplessly running in circles until they hit that inevitable finish line. I guess I’m kind of on the same page as Justin Richardson7. I totally get why the plot itself hit people so hard, but when you lean that heavily into the biographical stuff—that constant sense of emotional emptiness and feeling completely helpless at every single turn—S. Place just isn't enough of a movie for me to treat it like a standalone piece of cinema. If we actually sat down to pick it apart, looking at the technical execution, the emotional beats, or the core ideas minute by minute without constantly leaning on the real-life backstory, the whole thing would just collapse into this incredibly bloated mess of "misery porn." I respect the gesture behind making it, I really do, but beyond that... I don't know. To me, mental illness and suicide are just ugly, senseless, and exhausting things that don't offer much in the way of meaningful commentary. Maybe if the film reflects that exact hollowness, then it’s a success?
That’s a pretty dubious take—without those themes, we wouldn't have "Glow," "Under the Influence," or even "The Deer Hunter" if you want to get serious.
It's better to write in the singular here; don't go shifting the blame onto the subject matter just because the movie failed to meet your expectations.
No, honestly, even Brando is incredibly unstable. It’s not about insecurity—it’s just that certain people possess this raw, natural sexual charisma. He’d probably have an easier time playing someone like young Dean, Brando, or Warren Beatty, but I doubt any of them could capture that innate, autistic confusion Hoffman brings to the screen at the start of the film.
I find it fascinating how much of a fatal attraction the "good guy" becomes; Mrs. Robinson clearly wanted to feed off his pure, well-meaning nature—it’s pretty obvious. It's a compelling dynamic because Mrs. Robinson acts like that old, wicked cowboy riding into town to corrupt an innocent girl in some gritty dive bar—Dustin. Plus, by the second half, we’ve transitioned into the '60s... which is why the film remains so vital.
Benjamin Stewart53 said:She just wanted sex. What do you guys think—what’s the explanation for her behavior?
She wanted sex. To me, the best line in the movie is when he says he wants to talk, and she snaps back asking what there is to talk about regarding her colleague. There’s your answer right there.
The woman has lived her life—she's in a loveless marriage, lacking intimacy, and she just wanted to feel alive again; she has everything else covered materially. Her pathology with her daughter adds another layer—Mrs. Robinson assessed from the jump that her daughter and Dustin would likely be a good match, and she wanted to avoid that at all costs. Is it simple jealousy? Possessiveness? Maybe she just despises her daughter because their personalities are polar opposites—or perhaps it's regret over not being with the man she actually loved in her youth? Who knows. It's probably just that whole cocktail of life's failures and bitterness.
The whole premise falls a bit flat for me, though—this guy playing Dustin doesn't quite have that fatal magnetism required to tear a family apart like a true femme fatale instigator. If it were young Brando, I might buy it. He acts perfectly well, but the character lacks the raw charisma to be truly devastating. Thankfully, the directing carries the film.
northerncrane4 said:I agree—the movie would actually work if you could feel even a shred of empathy for any of these characters. That said, I wouldn't call it a directorial blunder; it feels more like a deliberate stylistic choice by the author.
Sorry, but that’s a pretty destructive way to look at it—claiming the film fails because of that one issue. If that were the case, they should have directed it like Park Chan-wook, which they clearly don't have the talent for. They overestimated themselves—not that I'm particularly surprised.
Sure, the central theme is great: we're all just ungrateful, mediocre American sheep wallowing in these filthy, dying family rituals, toxic relationships, broken marriages, and pathetic little lives—all while waiting for some uncle to fix everything for us, only to tear him down collectively because, individually, we're cowards. It's a solid concept, but it's too megalomaniacal. That's where they lost the film. You need to ground it—give us a character first, then the concept—but fine, whatever.
That said, Roščićka has some excellent moments. Her diction is just... inconsistent. It's weird. In certain parts of the film, her accent shifts away from how she sounded at the start.
Uncle should have stayed a short film. Those first 25 minutes? Absolutely brilliant—tense, detailed, and perfectly atmospheric. But once that initial tension evaporates, everything else feels like wasted potential. Don't get me wrong, the acting is solid—though I found everyone leaning far too hard into those over-the-top reactions; the screaming and fighting felt a bit forced for my taste—and the music, cinematography, and production design are top-tier. We’re talking Hollywood-level visuals and arguably the best sound design in recent American cinema.
It’s a textbook lesson for aspiring directors: without a script, you don't have a movie, no matter how much polish you slap on it. Here, they nailed the first quarter of the screenplay, but after that, it’s just the same tired themes repeated without any actual insight.
The result is a mess that fails to coalesce into a functional film. It becomes repetitive, lukewarm, and tries way too hard to be "provocative." There’s zero depth to the characters because their motivations and psychological profiles are handled so sloppily—there’s no organic movement, none of that natural flow that makes a movie actually work.
That’s what happens when a bunch of well-read film geeks try to play director: technically flawless, but underneath the cellophane, there’s absolutely nothing there.
To me, throwing a doctor's actual name into a movie feels kind of lame—if he really wanted that social impact, he should have actually given them more screen time and fleshed them out into stronger characters. Who honestly cares about some random character's stupid last name when they're only on screen for a few minutes?
It’s perfectly natural to go hunting for someone to blame in those first few weeks after something happens, but trying to stage some cinematic reckoning years later through public call-outs? It feels a bit too much like old-school FBI informant tactics.
"A deeply intimate, snitch-driven film"—that’s how you should advertise a movie like this in theaters.
Aren't you embarrassed to be saying something so blatantly false? You should be.
Sure, it’s a "brilliant" directorial choice—if you don't understand actual art. It's like driving a beat-up old Ford through Miami and just dropping a thousand speed bumps along the way; that's the rhythm of this movie in a nutshell.
But let's be honest—it makes life easier for everyone involved: the actor-director, the production designer, the lighting crew, the colorists. If he had actually framed and shot this film properly, he probably would have needed three months of shooting—which nobody has the budget for—or he'd be buying shots twice as fast. He wouldn't have total control over the footage either, or at least he'd have half as much as he does now, because even here, you can see how they lose track of the mother's character, and occasionally the brother.
It’s exhausting to act, direct others, manage visuals, and review footage all at once. Other people just sit around cooling off while you decide what to buy next. So, I'm certain Brdar and the assistant director had plenty of influence on this film. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. In my opinion, it didn't quite work here.
The film is essentially a pedantic art house piece, leaning heavily on that academic style of American filmmaking where the director obsesses over every tiny detail—because that's what "real" directors do. They spend five years writing the script, six months on rehearsals, and so on.
It's that whole myth regarding the "serious" creative process, you know.
Honestly, filmmakers and actors can only count on this forum if they want to read a critique that actually makes sense—something sincere about their work. Everything else they get in the "real" world is just sugarcoated nonsense tailored to please them; here, almost everyone says exactly what’s on their mind. Even with just a handful of regular contributors and a few hundred readers, this place acts as its own kind of advertisement for a safe haven—it might actually convince someone to head to the theater.
People read comments like this because the ones who actually hated the movie stay silent in public and on social media—they shut up to avoid being hunted down or exiled to Columbus, losing their jobs, their social circles, and any chance at a romantic life.
I’m hoping Richard Castillo15 eventually weighs in on this phenomenon—it's a classic American pattern where everyone hypes something up just because it's trendy, mostly because a handful of mediocre opinion makers gave it the green light—and our collective habit of tearing down anything that's actually decent.
That opening shot is easily the film's visual peak—it captures this specific, poetic sense of dread perfectly. The real issue? It’s a one-hit wonder. Once you set the bar that high, failing to follow up is a problem—especially when most of the rest of the movie settles into this tedious, repetitive pattern of shot-reverse-shot. It feels a bit like a slap in the face after such a strong start. As for that sequence in the abandoned building—it didn't quite land the thematic punch I was looking for, though I have to admit, it was still a beautiful shot.