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GreenCine Daily - ”Nothing I’ve seen in Cannes has possessed and disturbed me quite as much as the Directors’ Fortnight entry Tony Manero, from young Chilean director Pablo Larraín,” writes Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir.
“If Larraín has an argument to make about the power of pop culture, it definitely isn’t a positive one…. There’s a current of reckless, nihilistic black humor in Tony Manero, which might just make it a candidate for international cult status. But only if you’re the sort of person who understands that Texas Chainsaw Massacre is pretty funny too.”
“Chile’s darkest days coincide with the golden age of disco in Tony Manero, a disturbing character study with a trenchant edge of social satire,” writes Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily. “Larrain follows his 2006 debut Fuga with a film that works on at least three levels: notably, as the study of a warped loner, as a comment on fan fetishism, and as a portrait of Chile’s national traumas under the Pinochet dictatorship.”
The film, “despite its various forms of crudeness, is vital and strangely arresting,” writes Peter Brunette in the Hollywood Reporter. “It’s 1978, and Raul Peralta is a fiftysomething loser and petty criminal who is obsessed with John Travolta and his performance as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever…. The problem is that he becomes so intent on winning a John Travolta look-alike contest on television that he starts killing people who get in his way. And not very prettily either.”… [Full Story]
