Deborah Young

It’s a smart film with engaging moments. But working overtime to build an involving multi-layered drama with a flurry of hand-held camera movements and dizzying flashbacks, it ultimately turns repetitive and annoying.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

For those who like head-on, immersive emotional experiences at the movies, The Sky Is Pink may be a direct hit.

One couldn’t wish for a more painstakingly researched or beautifully rendered account of the infamous Dreyfus affair than Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse).... Yet the result is oddly lacking in heart and soul, almost as though a mask of military discipline held it in check.

The story has a tendency to scatter at times, and it banks a lot on the humanity of the three main actors who have some heart-wrenching moments riding out the joys and sorrows of modern life, complicated by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

It’s a far cry from dreary or depressing, but it also doesn’t offer any easy way to enter its emotional territory. Viewers who have gone through the experience of taking care of an ailing parent or relative may identify more fully with the slow-moving story.

While the stories the film tells are lively and never uninteresting, they fail to ignite an emotional explosion. The reach is also too broad for a film.

A film whose very surreal, disturbing first hour dissolves in disappointing B-movie nonsense at the end. Still it’s hard to remember a film about S&M as funny as this one, or one as beautifully and weirdly imagined.

Though it begs for a little lightening up, a moment of irony, a wink at the audience, this dead-serious fairy tale about a mysterious young woman (and a phantom automaton straight out of Hugo) is worth watching for Geoffrey Rush’s sensitive, never pandering performance.

The attention given to constructing each shot makes for a hypnotic visual experience, while lack of a progressive narrative telescopes film's running time into infinity.

It feels like every script-reader in the Italian-Swiss-German-Albanian-Kosovo coproduction cut out a line of dialogue in each scene, leaving behind an irritating silence and an enigmatic puzzle for the audience to second-guess.

The overwritten script has so many subplots it’s hard to keep the stories straight, especially when the ending throws a truly unexpected twist. But little matter; the exceptional tech work gives the film plenty of energy and excitement.

Only the bravura of the cast, first and foremost Park and Lee (both veterans of Unbowed), generates sufficient interest to see the film through to its surprising conclusion, recounted in a respectful coda many years later.

The film feels empty and intellectualized at the core, where it should feel powerfully emotional.

Despite a warmly interacting cast that includes Jennifer Ehle as Emily’s sister and Keith Carradine as her lion-maned, lionized father, and a valiant effort on the part of Nixon and Davies to externalize the poet’s inner demons in emotional, high-tension scenes, the film can’t escape an underlying static quality that extinguishes the flame before it can get burning.

A low-structure, high-involvement Brazilian free-for-all destined to take its place among hellish prison films, Carandiru plants a fist in the viewer's stomach.

In the end, there is a method in all this madness, suggested by Dafoe’s calm face and reassuring voice as Clint confronts his most emotionally charged memories with courage and curiosity.

Director Vincent Sandoval (Senorita) seems most interested in is using the convent as a metaphor for Filipino society in the Seventies, which buried its head in the sand while president Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and police tortured and murdered opposition protestors.

Where Guan excels is in straight dramatization.

All of these ingredients should come together in a mouth-watering finale, but such is not the case; in fact, the film becomes more obvious and less psychological as it goes on.

Holding the film together are simple but strong B&W visuals of offbeat types sitting around a table smoking and drinking java while they talk.

Film's pared-down look has a stylish simplicity.

Characters come and go quickly, leaving a feeling that there is too much compression of the multi-episode story.

Despite its careful control of tone and a raging central performance by Ciaran Hinds, which is actually sufficient reason to see the film, this story of a man who plunges into childhood memories in the aftermath of his wife’s death remains admirable but wingless.

There is a darkness in all these “average” characters, underlined by low-key acting and the film’s sinisterly calm, measured pace.

Viewers of this Venice competition title are likely to find the ideological confusion contagious and the romance pretty trite. But the camerawork and music choices are lively and may enable a younger gen to relate and discuss.

It's the kind of cartoonish film where, no matter what the odds and how many bullets are flying at our heroes, they never get seriously injured.

Pleasantly watchable.