This took me a while to warm up to. Halfway through the film I was thinking, ‘I’m invested because of the score and the staging — that’s about it.’ The second half completely drew me in — it seemed every time the simple musical theme would swell to accentuate the scene preceeding it, I loved the film a bit more. A two-hour crescendo to a delightfully staged anticlimax.

I’m growing to really love Godard. My first was Breathless – nearly three years ago, possibly my first FNW film, and among my first ‘old’ and foreign-language films. His technique didn’t work for me at all then. The jump cuts took me out of the film, I complained. Well, yeah. Since, I’ve acquired a taste for reflexivity in art, and Godard’s the master as far as that’s concerned. Contempt may err on the side of over-calculating and over-intellectualizing, but I’ll still call it a superlative examination of art v. life, communication and understanding, self-determination &c…

1963-wise and movie-about-movies-wise it is not 8 1/2’s equal, but second place in either respect is still quite something. Also my runner-up among Godard’s work so far, after Vivre sa vie.

Bit of a letdown. Never really hits its stride, & falls back on too many trite conventions for my taste (the romantic arc, his heroic escape). Whitaker is really more of a supporting player, but he’s such a towering and genuinely terrifying figure — what works in this picture really works because of him — and he deserves every accolade he’s received for his performance. It’s profoundly brutal and unsettling — but how could it not be? I think the film turns true events into a successful narrative but it doesn’t really add a whole lot to them.

Even if this movie had been thoroughly bad, I would have been guaranteed to love it. Just one of those movies that seem to be tailor-made for me: I could easily fall prey to a Barbara Covett in fifteen years or become her myself in thirty; from my vantage point now it is delicious fun to witness the disastrous fallout. Nevermind the inappropriate sex with the pubescent boy; that is merely the catalyst to a story about two women, to a story about lesbian vampirism. Right up my alley.

It takes a funny-campy book and turns it into serious camp — well, it is careful to toe the line of realism, and strikes just the right balance. The performances are highly wrought to be sure, but they are fine nonetheless. Glass’ score too is unnecessarily prominent and intense and Marber’s screenplay is wordy and mannered as ever, but it all works. The book was vaguely creepy but full of comic relief. The film is saturated with the sinister, much more intense; one laughs, but in appreciation of what is dangerously bitchy and not merely catty. One laughs, because though we know she’s a bit mad and we’re not really rooting for her, her malevolent view on the world is too delightful to dismiss.

I loved it more than it deserves, but would have done despite any number of flaws. As it is actually very, very good, it becomes my #2 of the year…

It is possible that Ben U loves this movie all out of proportion, and I liked it far more than I should have (it slides in to my #5 spot for the year, thus far). Because it is a flawed, bizarre film, not really great by any standard, but absolutely one of the most enjoyable and original films I have seen this year. It actually evokes all the senses strongly, but its ability to suggest smell even while the viewer is actually surrounded by the stench of stale popcorn and strangers’ body odor is something extraordinary. It proceeds with all the magical inevitability of a particularly sinister fairy tale, although it is not, as Ebert puts it, “a dark, dark, dark film.” I’d leave it at one dark. It is lovably dark.

Still, it is an erratic, mercurial thing. The ending (*spoilerish*) — not the very end, which I thought fitting, but the execution scene — was unpersuasive and unsatisfying. Unimaginative. Big let-down on the climax. Confused Still, it’s a grand time for long stretches. Whishaw is very, very good; I enjoy, as ever, Hoffman’s peculiar choices in roles of late; and Rickman, what can I say? Rickman is always a tasty treat.

So — definitely recommended, and lots of bonus points for originality and general delightfulness.

These days, I’m at my most fangirlish when it comes to ER I, so there’s no point in enumerating what I liked and didn’t like about this. It has nothing to do with the film, but rather with my girlish preoccupations. Sooo… let’s say it’s an unusually swank job from Masterpiece Theater, and all one would expect as such. La di da.

Wow. This is absolutely the film of the year, so far. Cuaron’s vision is uncompromising and relentless, bleak but always filled with hope. I will have to watch it two or three more times to be able to take the emotion out of the scene enough to watch for it, but his eight-minute take is the equal of anything Welles or Altman attempted. This film is terrifying and awe-inspiring. I watched most of it with every muscle in my body clenched, and by the end I just wanted to weep.

WOW. I expected to love all the films in the Colors trilogy, and I expected to love them about equally. This one blows the other two out of the water. Such an exciting and absorbing mosaic of chance and fate — in the most original and unforced ways. I am in love with Kieslowski’s filmmaking. Irene Jacob is wonderful but Trintignant owns the film, a delightfully idiosyncratic Prospero figure.