No rating is possible for this. The Palace is a deliberate, intentional trash, vulgar kitsch realised with impeccable skill.
It takes a special kind of filmmaker to make people sit through a parade of ugliness(in its most "unpoetic" way) and vulgarity, and even make them have a little bit of fun in-between. In my case, a packed house, not a single walk out, although the urge was strong, particularly during the first half. That's due to the filmmaking talents of the director. He couldn't help but be good even in a film intentionally off-putting.
One cannot help, but find a certain kind of repulsive beauty in the fact that a 90 year old director of Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenet, works that will live for as long as the art of cinema itself lives, chose this to be his possible swan song, the ending of this movie to be the last scene of his filmography. The Palace is a juicy middle finger from Polanski to everbody and everything, including, and most importantly, his own self.
No rating, but certainly worth a watch. The rating is impossible, because for what the film tries to achieve, it achieves with great skill and tremendous success. Low or high scores only signify people's opinions of an idea of such a movie, not the movie itself. The Palace sitting at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes is a great representation of this. Polanski got our lovely critics exactly where he wanted them, made them part of the joke. A bold, thorough critic, if he saw through Polanski and his intentions with The Palace and wanted to turn it all on its head, would destroy the film in his review, but in the end give it a 100% without explanation. Alas...
