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They Live

They Live (AKA John Carpenter's They Live)

1988

John Carpenter

Roddy Piper, Keith David, Meg Foster, John Lawrence ...

6.4

13,628

Sci-Fi. Fantasy. Action. Horror. Comedy Nada, a down-on-his-luck construction worker, discovers a pair of special sunglasses. Wearing them, he is able to see the world as it really is: people being bombarded by media and government with messages like "Stay Asleep", "No Imagination", "Submit to Authority". Even scarier is that he is able to see that some usually normal-looking people are in fact ugly aliens in charge of the massive campaign to keep humans subdued.

	Author	Review
United States	Joshua Rothkopf Rolling Stone	"[It] deserves to be thought of as a masterpiece, an artist’s defiant last grab at substance before losing the thread. It’s a cheesy but lovable movie"	POS
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"Carpenter's wit and storytelling craft make this fun and watchable, although the script takes a number of unfortunate shortcuts"	NEU
United Kingdom	Colette Maude Time Out	"While themes of indoctrination and conspiracy prove initially intriguing, the film quickly descends into fistfights and gunfire."	NEU
United States	Scott Tobias AV Club	"'They Live' is probably Carpenter's last great (okay, near-great) film (...) The film seems as relevant now as it did two decades ago"	POS
United States	Matt Zoller Seitz rogerebert.com	"One of Carpenter's oddest and most distinctive works (...) In all the superficial ways, this is a dated movie. Put the sunglasses on and you realize it hasn't aged a day."	POS
United States	Michael Wilmington Los Angeles Times	"The tone keeps shifting radically. It has some silly lines, plot lapses and goofball action scenes. But you can forgive the movie everything because of the sheer nasty pizazz of its central concept."	NEU
United Kingdom	William Thomas Empire	"A bizarre, intriguing combination of political allegory and old-fashioned paranoid horror (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Calum Marsh Slant	"The trick at the center of 'They Live', of course, is that its message doesn’t seem subversive or challenging at all (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS

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