“‘You may think you know my story,’ Jennifer Lopez intones in the prologue to her new film, ‘but you’ve never heard it from me before.'” “This Is Me… Now” is presumably her attempt to rectify that, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. Billed as a “narrative-driven cinematic odyssey”, and released to coincide with Lopez’s ninth studio album, it’s a film-cum-music-video that presents the singer doing a succession of “bonkers” things: surviving a high-speed motorcycle crash, single-handedly preventing “a futuristic factory from exploding”, getting chased through the Bronx by ghosts, stalking around “a luxurious Los Angeles mansion the size of a B&Q”.
By the end, “I can’t say I felt any more clued up” on her life than I had been beforehand, but I was “vibrating to the tips of my fingers”. Whatever “This Is Me… Now” actually is – “movie, music video, open-door therapy session, entirely insane CG-drenched R&B cheese dream – it is a modern-day pop-art tour de force”.
From where I was sitting, it seemed “as shamelessly narcissistic a film” as you could ever “lay eyes upon”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. “Unless you’re a superfan”, this string of “weird dramatised vignettes” are pretty much “unwatchable”. Lopez “shelled out $20m from her own wallet” to make “This Is Me… Now”, said Nadira Goffe on Slate. And though it is “something of a mess”, it’s a “fun mess”. Frankly, I’d far rather have a star who, in the later stages of her career, opts to pour her millions into a senseless passion project than one who “tortures us all with a three-hour prestige period film for which she went ‘method’ in the hopes of finally attaining that Oscar”.