Good Luck

Good Luck's political implications—most prominently that the almighty dollar is humanity's enduring slave master—are expertly woven into the hallucinatory aural-visual fabric of the film.

Both halves feature breathtaking camera work.

As often in Russell’s films, Good Luck splits the interest between observer and observed, between the lives that Russell and crew capture in their painstaking long takes and the very process of composing and shooting those takes.

The first part is terrific and transfixing. Working in transportive long takes, Russell achieves some nearly miraculous effects—notably, a shot that prowls down a sloe-black mine tunnel to land in close-up on a jackhammer—as he blends the plutonic and the Platonic: the underworld and the allegory of the cave.