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The Limits of Control

  • 20092009
  • RR
  • 1h 56m
IMDb RATING
6.2/10
20K
YOUR RATING
  • Cast & crew
  • User reviews
  • Trivia
  • IMDbPro
The Limits of Control (2009)
The story of a mysterious loner (De Bankolé), a stranger, whose activities remain meticulously outside the law. He is in the process of completing a job, yet he trusts no one, and his objectives are not initially divulged.
Play trailer1:36
4 Videos
99+ Photos
  • Crime
  • Drama
  • Mystery

The story of a mysterious loner, a stranger in the process of completing a criminal job.The story of a mysterious loner, a stranger in the process of completing a criminal job.The story of a mysterious loner, a stranger in the process of completing a criminal job.

IMDb RATING
6.2/10
20K
YOUR RATING
  • Director
    • Jim Jarmusch
  • Writer
    • Jim Jarmusch
  • Stars
    • Isaach De Bankolé
    • Alex Descas
    • Jean-François Stévenin
Top credits
  • Director
    • Jim Jarmusch
  • Writer
    • Jim Jarmusch
  • Stars
    • Isaach De Bankolé
    • Alex Descas
    • Jean-François Stévenin
  • See production, box office & company info
    • 121User reviews
    • 110Critic reviews
    • 41Metascore
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 1 win

    Videos4

    The Limits of Control: UK Trailer
    Trailer 1:36
    The Limits of Control: UK Trailer
    The Limits of Control
    Trailer 1:40
    The Limits of Control
    The Limits of Control
    Clip 1:03
    The Limits of Control
    The Limits of Control
    Clip 1:40
    The Limits of Control

    Photos109

    John Hurt in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Tilda Swinton in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Isaach De Bankolé and Tilda Swinton in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Isaach De Bankolé and Yûki Kudô in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Jim Jarmusch, Isaach De Bankolé, and Gael García Bernal in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Gael García Bernal in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Hiam Abbass and Gael García Bernal in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control (2009)
    John Hurt in The Limits of Control (2009)
    Jim Jarmusch in The Limits of Control (2009)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Isaach De Bankolé
    Isaach De Bankolé
    • The Lone Manas The Lone Man
    Alex Descas
    Alex Descas
    • The Creoleas The Creole
    Jean-François Stévenin
    • The Frenchmanas The Frenchman
    Óscar Jaenada
    Óscar Jaenada
    • The Waiteras The Waiter
    Luis Tosar
    Luis Tosar
    • Man with Violinas Man with Violin
    Paz de la Huerta
    Paz de la Huerta
    • The Nude Womanas The Nude Woman
    Tilda Swinton
    Tilda Swinton
    • The Blondeas The Blonde
    Yûki Kudô
    Yûki Kudô
    • Moleculesas Molecules
    John Hurt
    John Hurt
    • Man with Guitaras Man with Guitar
    Gael García Bernal
    Gael García Bernal
    • The Mexicanas The Mexican
    Hiam Abbass
    Hiam Abbass
    • The Driveras The Driver
    Bill Murray
    Bill Murray
    • The Americanas The American
    Héctor Colomé
    Héctor Colomé
    • Second Americanas Second American
    María Isasi
    María Isasi
    • Flamenco Club Waitressas Flamenco Club Waitress
    Norma Yessenia Paladines
    • Flight Attendantas Flight Attendant
    Alejandro Muñoz Biggie
    • Street Kidas Street Kid
    • (as Alexander Muñoz Biggie)
    Cristina Sierra Sánchez
    • Street Kidas Street Kid
    Pablo Lucas Ortega
    • Street Kidas Street Kid
    • Director
      • Jim Jarmusch
    • Writer
      • Jim Jarmusch
    • All cast & crew
    • See more cast details at IMDbPro

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    Storyline

    Edit
    A solitary man who does not speak Spanish is an underground courier. Two men who are both thuggish and philosophical send him to Madrid with cryptic instructions. Over the course of a few days, he receives his instructions from a series of distinctive individuals who provide words of philosophy or of warning and also give him a matchbox with a tiny piece of paper, which he reads then eats, accompanied by espresso served in two cups. He is quiet, self-contained, focused on his work. He has rules. He encounters and at times transmits a violin, diamonds, a guitar, and a map. Is he a smuggler? Merely an independent conduit? Or, something else? —<jhailey@hotmail.com>
    • tai chi
    • espresso
    • matchbox
    • seville spain
    • guitar string
    • 69 more
    • Plot summary
    • Plot synopsis
    • Taglines
      • For every way in, there is another way out.
    • Genres
      • Crime
      • Drama
      • Mystery
      • Thriller
    • Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)
      • Rated R for graphic nudity and some language
    • Parents guide

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      The Finnish movie, to which Man with Guitar (Sir John Hurt) refers, is La vie de bohème (1992) by Director Aki Kaurismäki, a friend of Writer and Director Jim Jarmusch.
    • Goofs
      When the Lone Man travels from Madrid to Sevilla, he enters a S 100 AVE train set. But the interior shots are clearly done in a S 103 (Velaro E), a totally different - and much newer - type of train.
    • Quotes

      Blonde: Are you interested in films, by any chance? I like really old films. You can really see what the world looked like, thirty, fifty, a hundred years ago. You know the clothes, the telephones, the trains, the way people smoked cigarettes, the little details of life. The best films are like dreams you're never sure you've really had. I have this image in my head of a room full of sand. And a bird flies towards me, and dips its wing into the sand. And I honestly have no idea whether this image came from a dream, or a film. Sometimes I like it in films when people just sit there, not saying anything.

    • Crazy credits
      "NO LIMITS NO CONTROL" at the end of the closing credits
    • Connections
      Edited into The Rotten Tomatoes Show: Watchmen/Shuttle/12 (2009)
    • Soundtracks
      Feedbacker
      Written & Performed by Boris

      Courtesy of Boris

    User reviews121

    Review
    Top review
    Jim succumbs to Film Festival-itis
    I like Jim Jarmusch personally (I first met him when we were both new to NYC, in the early '80s) and as a filmmaker, but I believe LIMITS was a mistake. He needs to seek out a wise old mentor, I suggest Werner Herzog (who recently reinvented his career with 3 fine Hollywood genre films in the manner of Sam Fuller, one of Jim's heroes). Otherwise he has fallen into an easy trap: what I call Film Festival-itis.

    Film Festivals were invented in the 1930s and 1940s for local tourism & boosterism reasons (Cannes most obviously), became entrenched in the industry in the 1950s and more recently have spun out of control, numbering in the thousands and pretty much used for phony "snob appeal" in posters & trailers, using the familiar Cannes palm logo to surround the names of many idiotic and worthless events. About 25 years ago I came up with a theory that many of the "hottest" international auteurs were locked into the Fest circuit, simply because they had become the darlings of the two dozen or so most-prominent gatekeepers: the festival directors and programmers. Flash forward towards the present day and you can see how Von Trier and Tarantino spring boarded their careers (and critical acceptance, along with devoted fan bases) from key festival exposure. But for every lucky Lars or Quentin there are thousands of indie filmmakers whose movies are CONSUMED on the festival circuit -virtually their entire audience (apart from that bastard offspring, the "home viewer" addicted to Blu-Ray and DVDs) is at these phony events, with little or no subsequent theatrical exposure. Based on my recent study (using 2000 as a sample year), I estimate that roughly 90% of the indie films being made in the past decade or so have failed to find a theatrical distributor.

    Back in the '80s it was a familiar group: Wenders, Greenaway, Akerman, Angelopoulos, de Oliveira, Ruiz, Tanner, Kaurismaki (and less so his brother Mika), Jarmusch, several Italians like Amelio, Tornatore and Salvatores (the second wave after Bellocchio & Bertolucci of the '60s), plus up & coming talents from exotic places like Taiwan, Iran and South Korea. What most had in common was a devotion to minimalism: the shot, the lonely landscape was pre-eminent. Film festival directors and cinema buffs are united in their devotion to such minimalist beauty, whether it be evident in the work of now-abandoned Miklos Jancso, or the best of Herzog.

    With THE LIMITS OF CONTROL Jarmusch has made a film directly appealing to this film fest sensibility: it answers the pointless question: what new film would Greenaway, Akerman, Raul, Wim & Aki want to see? Such a clubby, insider approach to cinema may be rewarding if one is an amateur navel-gazer with no interest in the audience beyond a small circle of friends -perhaps (I dread) the future of "cinema/video" in a world where You Tube and MySpace are taken seriously. But to my mind this is a dead end, and a career-ending move by someone as talented as Jarmusch.

    To a film buff, the obvious starting point for LIMITS OF CONTROL is Jean-Pierre Melville, whose LE SAMOURAI is the unequal-able quintessence of the loner genre. When the protagonist is lying on his bed in a lonely room, Jim fails to achieve the beauty of Melville's color drained cinematography and experimental simultaneous zoom in/dolly out surreal effects, and although Paz is a photogenic bedmate, he doesn't give poor Isaach any memorable motifs comparable to Alain Delon's wonderful pet parakeet in the apartment.

    So Jim had Isaach wander around, looking cool in a series of Regis Philbin monochrome suit/shirt combos (casting Regis in the role would have elevated the film immensely for me, just as substituting Al Roker for Bill Murray in the original GROUNDHOG DAY would have made that one brilliant). In the very dull & sycophantic "making of" docu on the DVD Jim is explicit in his rant about the importance of repetition and his foolish claim that nothing is original, all stories have been done already, only variations are possible, but in the final product LIMITS OF CONTROL is way too close to Peter Greenaway's trademark approach to cinema. Copping out doesn't hide this fact. And the philosophical doggerel of his screenplay's dialog is as fatuous as Jim's telling remark in the docu that he is such an expert on music and film history, but what he DOESN'T know is what counts. Jim's apologist fans (the LAST thing he needs!) have already littered IMDb with comments on the zen-like nature of LIMITS, but its endlessly repeated guest star dialog is rather on the level of "Confucius say..." instead.

    From an early supporter and fellow Ohioan, I say: it's time to pull your socks up Jim (to paraphrase my favorite Physics professor's Britishism tag line from college). One of my favorite filmmakers in the '60s when I was introduced to Underground Films every Friday & Saturday at midnight showings was George Kuchar, and he has maintained his amateurism for 40 years. I always preferred his funny, cute little story shorts to the bombastic pretentiousness of critical darlings like Michael Snow (see: WAVELENGTH) or Hollis Frampton (ZORN'S LEMMA). Jarmusch's sardonic humor bridges these two extremes of what used to be called the avant garde.

    Jim, you've made the big time -you're almost in the pantheon of greats, so don't blow it by listening to the yes-men; you're better than that! Make a film Jean Renoir would be proud of -it's pointless to go down the abstract imagery road of Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke.
    helpful•20
    21
    • lor_
    • Jan 13, 2010

    FAQ1

    • Is "The Limits of Control" based on a novel?

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • September 19, 2009 (Japan)
    • Countries of origin
      • United States
      • Japan
    • Languages
      • English
      • Spanish
      • Arabic
      • French
      • Japanese
    • Also known as
      • No Limits No Control
    • Filming locations
      • Torres Blancas - 37 Avenida de América, Madrid, Spain
    • Production companies
      • Focus Features
      • Entertainment Farm (EF)
      • PointBlank Films
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $426,688
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $55,820
      • May 3, 2009
    • Gross worldwide
      • $1,981,134
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Technical specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 56 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • Dolby Digital
      • DTS
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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