Natural Born Killers (1994)

The critic praises the film's satirical take on media obsession with violence and celebrity criminals, noting how it captures the moral emptiness of killers and the feeding frenzy it inspires. Stone's stylistic excesses and the performances, especially by Harrelson and Lewis, are highlighted as effective in delivering a slap-in-the-face indictment of society.

The film is a heavy-duty acid trip and Oliver Stone’s most exciting work from a filmmaking standpoint, a scabrous and relevant look at society promoting murderers as pop icons and the media profiting from it.

This is the movie Oliver Stone was born to make, an audacious and astonishing vision of media darlings who are serial killers, delivered with relentless visual dexterity that mocks societal fascination with violence.

The critic finds the film a splenetic, sophomoric but captivating media satire whose visual inventiveness and hallucinogenic style make it an enduringly fascinating achievement, even if its commentary is subordinated to surface pleasures. The 4K restoration is praised for capturing the film's shifting formats and saturated colors better than ever.

Stone’s flashy, hyperbolic film sells itself as shocking satire but is one of the least disturbing films about mass murder, a frivolous barrage of glib ideas that fails to make viewers think anew about violence or culture.

Oliver Stone's film is an assault from start to finish that succeeds as a rare risk-taking audio-visual experience and constructs a frighteningly recognisable vision of America. It is difficult to describe as good entertainment in any classical sense, with a non-existent plot, absurdly clichéd dialogue and a thesis rammed home very crudely.

The film is a technically flashy but ultimately unremarkable variation on familiar outlaw-couple stories, with broad media satire and little room for character development. Its main virtue is being less explicit than the surrounding hype suggested, but overall it feels turgid.

The critic finds Stone's 1994 film tiresome and close to unwatchable, criticizing its grotesque, garish style and heavy-handed barrage of visual effects in service of obvious points about media, violence and celebrity. They single out its value as a time-capsule of early-90s American culture and the tabloid media's parasitic relationship with violent actors.

The critic finds the film's satire on media and celebrity killers somewhat dated but praises Oliver Stone's bold visual style, inventive editing across film stocks, and Robert Richardson's cinematography as the elements that make it enduring and hard to look away from.

The critic finds the film an indulgent, gratuitous splatter spree about senseless killers that treats the audience as cretins and fails to make its media satire point effectively despite flashy editing. Performances by the leads and Tommy Lee Jones are noted, but the overall result is seen as a messy, excessive mess.