The End

I really wanted to like this, but the songs do not work.

Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic eccentricity is admirable for its ambition, which often feels nearly endless—as, alas, does the film itself.

For all its ambitions, "The End" does grow tedious, and at two and a half hours, it's overkill. But it's unsettling in ways that linger long after the end credits roll, and disturbing in what it has to say about us...

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

As actual modern technocrats dream of escaping environmental catastrophe by fleeing to Mars, Oppenheimer’s staid vision of the splendid isolation of the upper class is nowhere near as ambitious as it needs to be.

By the time we finally reach the end of “The End,” we’re thinking it’s a damn shame that these thinly drawn, self-involved caricatures were the ones who survived the apocalypse, while billions of presumably more interesting people were swept away.

It's what happens if we don't change.

The End’s erratically successful creative bravura frequently charmed me.

The fact that the family that is riding out the apocalypse in director Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The End” does sing their feelings, in emotional musical numbers, adds to the absurdity of this strangely beautiful movie.

It's just aimless. "The End," ironically, never seems to be heading toward one.