USA – Drama, Music – Year: 2014 – Running time: 106 mins
Audience feedback: Rating: 
(4.54 from 29 responses)
- ‘Excellent’: 20 votes
- ‘Very Good’: 6 votes
- ‘Good’: 0 votes
- ‘Satisfactory’: 1 vote
- ‘Poor’: 1 vote
- + 1 uncategorised comment
A young jazz drummer struggles to succeed under the tutelage of a tough mentor at the country’s best music school. Even his bruised and bloodstained hands have to be soaked in ice water while he is showered with excoriating epithets and flying chairs! This is a simple but gripping and sprightly story about ‘suffering for one’s art’, edited with finger-snapping dexterity and told with a rim-shock twang.
Whiplash is an extraordinarily taut, accomplished piece of work for a debut feature. It’s also unusual in having such a definite point to make – albeit perhaps a pretty objectionable one.
David Sexton (This is London)
Director: Damien Chazelle
Film notes (ed. Mark Miller)
Audience feedback
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Selected UK Reviews:
Independent (Geoffrey McNab)
Sight and Sound (Callum Marsh)