A REVIEW FOR MY #1 FAVORITE FEATURE FILM OF MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE, AND MAYBE FOREVER WITH A 99.95% PROBABILITY.
Don't read it as a review, but as a magazine article. This is the longest thing I have ever written about one single film, but it is also the only review that made me cry out of sentiment while constructing it.
Before starting to construct a modest, fully developed essay about Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, let's make a nostalgic resume about some…
***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***
As any brilliant avant-garde film, Peter Greenaway's absolute masterpiece is an attack to the senses. This attack, however, has the sensual danger of awakening the most primitive instincts of the human being. It has always been interesting to notice Greenaway's past focus on architectonic stillness and provocative imagery with symbolic representations. This film is no exception. Conglomerating bizarre elements and a literally unbeatable sense of humor that abounds in cleverness…
Seigner is at his most spectacular. Forget about your extremely passionate and submissive Mimi in Bitter Moon (1992); Polanski now opts for meta-art in his publicly recognized stage-adaptation talent, where the theater represents fiction in film and the "real-life" discussions, attrezzo, costumes and lighting fixes represent the audiences' criticism. Even the opening and the closing shots mimic the audience act of entering and leaving the theater.
It's much more subtle than Iñárritu's 2014 middle finger through a worth-watching Keaton, however.…
The premise is campy enough to sell: Depp stars in the leading role as a book detective unraveling satanic secrets behind the three last surviving copies of a book allegedly written by Lucifer himself. This is just Polanski having fun: good opening, camp cult climax and an acceptable evolution. The pace is consistently engrossing to put it succinctly; Depp is just so fun and I did perceive a strong aura of dark humor permeating the whole premise throughout.
It might…
Before you ask, this is not my first Refn movie. In that way, I can know that:
- He still likes to dress his crooks with light grey pants and have some of them bald, like if they were still living in Denmark.
- He still uses an awesome techno soundtrack (with some pop touches that I can forgive) to open his films and to close them. The underground nudist dive bars / seedy joints cannot be omitted, of course.…
