eXistenZ

Gets diagnosably schizo. Read full review

Leigh is perfectly cast as the game-pod goddess. Read full review

This is not light-hearted entertainment. Be prepared to think. Uncle Dave will take you someplace new. Read full review

eXistenZ gives us Cronenberg at his wittiest, and Leigh at her most vulnerable and fascinating. Read full review

The Cronenberg trademarks are here in full force, including an outrageous sexual suggestiveness in his bizarre special effects. Read full review

With his usual consummate visual skills and his flair for the nauseatingly audacious, David Cronenberg’s written (spottily) and directed (stunningly) a movie that often makes you feel as if you'd lost contact with reality: a twisted, nightmarish tale of futuristic reality games and a couple on the run. [23 April 1999, Friday, p.D]

Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive! Read full review

Though Cronenberg makes some creepy insinuations, eXistenZ is more effective as a black comedy than as a visceral shocker. Read full review

Audaciously combining conviction and childish humor, this SF thriller reminds us that the distinction between the tangible and the intangible may be frighteningly arbitrary--an idea that's made too scary ever to seem trivial, no matter how silly things get. Read full review

Almost buoyant in its creepiness and positively bejeweled in its disgust -- the movie can be enjoyably considered as a self-conscious fiction in the convoluted tradition of Raul Ruiz or Brian De Palma's "Raising Cain." Read full review

This is unquestionably Cronenberg Lite, but there is plenty of fun to be had from the absurdities and convoluted plotting, and a solid cast lends stature to the far-fetched fantasies. Read full review

A triumphant return to the icky, otherworldly eerieness that graced such earlier Cronenberg works as "Scanners," "Videodrome" and "Dead Ringers." Read full review

In the game of eXistenZ it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. Read full review

Cronenberg is one of the cinema's true originals, and a trip to his spooky world is always a harrowing, thought-provoking experience. Read full review

Typically icky and unusually witty. Read full review

As loaded with special effects as "The Matrix,'' but they're on a different scale. Many of his best effects are gooey, indescribable organic things, and some of the most memorable scenes involve characters eating things that surgeons handle with gloves on. Read full review

Viewers should stay far away unless they have a strong stomach for deliberately disgusting effects. Read full review

Cronenberg, who both wrote and directed, is out to fool you -- to give you just enough information to let you figure out what's going on, and then bluff you out of using it. The movie, in other words, is a game itself. Read full review

For many, eXistenZ will probably be more trick than treat. But the film epitomizes the phrase sui generis ("of its own kind") and still maintains a wry attitude toward itself. Read full review

EXistenZ, unlike existence, just lacks that certain mystique. Read full review

David Cronenberg is one of the most intellectual film makers around.

Its name, the film's title, is pronounced "eggs is tense" and meant to have a whiff of the philosophical, even if its intellectual ambition seems mostly limited to spelling affectations. Read full review

Dead-on for Cronenberg fans though the mutant reptile and amphibian factory might be a tad(pole) too much for the squeamish at heart. Read full review

If this new film seems less prescient than its predecessor, it's only because reality is rapidly catching up with Cronenberg's warped imagination. Read full review

The movie may be a grim warning against the perils of technology and its ability to spew alternative realities, but Cronenberg himself can hardly claim to have his feet firmly planted on the ground. Read full review

Because of the potential of the idea and Cronenberg's reputation as a film maker, it's a real disappointment to watch eXistenZ fall apart the way it does. Read full review

Cronenberg can create alternative worlds like few other filmmakers, and that's a real achievement. If he learns to make us care about them, he'll really have something. [23 April 1999, Life, p.8E]

The performances are so terrible that it's hard to know whether Cronenberg wants to signal that much of what we're seeing isn't "real" or he has just forgotten how to write for hemoglobular flesh vessels--i.e., human beings. Read full review

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ. Read full review