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I can't say I'm a fan of country music, but I was really interested in knowing more about this scene. I wasn't familiar with most musicians, I only knew Townes Van Zandt who really, for me, was the best part of the documentary. The other musicians are quite talented, but their lyrics are all about whiskey, beer and wine and having a good time in Texas, which compared to Van Zandt's lyrics, they are just too weak, too shallow. It was funny to see Townes acting all silly and then seeing him play "Waitin' around to die" with such passion and making his neighbor cry. It was disappointing that the documentary didn't show any more footage of him or something deeper about this whole music scene and its roots or context. Instead, it even shows a sequence like a Jack Daniel's commercial and a long pre-show preparation which are almost equal to the time given to Townes, so it kind of feels like an insult. Nearly by the end, David Allan Coe makes the documentary more interesting and emotional, but overall, I think it's almost like a documentary you could just listen to instead of watch.

It starts very well, with very realistic performances, interesting situations and clever dialogues. The archive footage most of the time blends fine with the fiction and you almost feel it's all real. However, the texts on the screen soon become very annoying and redundant, they make the film very slow and add an over dramatic narrative that becomes too discursive and propagandist. The film turns into some kind of documentary and loses its early approach. It even includes a voice over that to me felt completely out of place. Another thing that bothered me was the hysterical officials yelling and arguing, those scenes were explanatory and silly. If the film would have maintained the direction of the first scenes and kept a better pace it would be a masterpiece. I say you have to be in a good mood to watch this film because it's very depressing, there's no hope, it ends up as a complete a psychological horror film.

It's disappointing how a great story is told in such an unfocused and weak way. There's no clear point of view, no character drives the story and the boy who seems to be the protagonist has no objective. I think the weakest part of the film is the poor casting of the protagonist since he never shows any emotion at all, not even when he asks about things he's supposed to care about and he just wanders around observing everything for no reason, doing absolutely nothing. The dialogues are also very bad, like when the boy and Ignas talk about getting land for free and out of nowhere bring out believing in God. The most emotional scenes which are between father and son, suffer from over exposition, old secret stories that are triggered out of nothing and what's worse, don't change anything in the boy. This is a shame because the father (Arvydas Dapsys) delivers a great performance. The only aspects of the film that made me watch it through were the cinematography, the locations and the rest of the characters which are really superb.

The wide variety of characters makes the story very engaging and alive, it makes the village feel almost real. This is important because everyone is affected in different ways by the political oppression and the selfish interests of a few. The acting is superb, especially Mahmoud Al Meleji who is amazing. The cinematography is mostly vivid and organic, it's never a distraction or anything too pretentious. The music was alright, but the non-diegetic peasant songs felt a little off since they seemed a little pamphletary and hopeful for the specific context of this village. My only big problem with this film is that it leaves some important loose ends such as the story about the boy (Muhammad Al Saqqa ) with whom the film starts as some kind of coming-of-age, and then the killing of Elwani which seems completely random and filmed in a poor way. Then most of these characters start lacking depth, always talking about the same issues and repeating actions that have almost no consequences. Most of the problems are solved easily, but from both sides, so the struggle feels more like a summary than a chaotic and emotional situation, and when it reaches the end it seems too abrupt, because it only focuses on one character, forgetting about everyone else and the village. I think I can understand why this film is important for the Egyptians and it's definitely worth watching since it is an universal story, but I get the feeling it's more important for what it represents rather than what it really is.

I think Stanley Kubrick was right when he thought the story was un-cinematic. I feel the film struggles between the point of view of Schanberg and Pran. Schanberg's story is really boring, there's no depth in this character, we learn nothing from him. Pran, on the other hand, is a much richer character and Hain S. Ngor's performance makes it even better. The cinematographic approach might have been powerful back in the day, especially with the big production level, but the documentary style falls short since most scenes just pass by without any emotional weight but the intrinsic impact of the horrors of war. The last thirty minutes of the film are much more interesting in this aspect, but unfortunately, after almost two hours, I found hard to follow Pran's journey without just wanting the movie to end. I feel a better leading actor would have improved the movie greatly while also developing more the friendship between Schanberg and Pran. I really liked John Malkovich, such a simple character and yet full of life. I wish the movie would have had more memorable scenes like "Apocalypse now" by Francis Ford Coppola or "Full metal jacket" by Stanley Kubrick.

You could say this movie has many weaknesses such as some corny dialogues, clichés and perhaps too much focus on the narcissist main character, but it's full of emotions and explores very well the world of dreams. It has so many subliminal messages and cultural references that it creates a very rich world that it's easy to connect to. All the performances are great. I've seen the original Spanish film by Alejandro Amenábar and I love it, too, despite they both share similar flaws, but I feel the much smaller budget somehow limited the potential of the story and especially its design. The scene of "Vanilla Sky" in Times Square is really powerful and unique. Setting it in New York during autumn and winter along all the art design makes for many beautiful scenes. It also has probably one of the best soundtracks: Radiohead, R. E. M., The Beach Boys, Peter Gabriel, Jeff Buckley, Sigur Rós and more, but I agree the music doesn't always work in every scene and sometimes it doesn't even have the right treatment. It's true that everything can be justified in this world of dreams, anything is possible, but when the movie tries so hard to solve itself and follow a story it loses many of its subtleties. It mixes genres badly, goes from drama to thriller with a lot of madness and begins explaining too much. This is where most of the secondary characters fall apart like figments of the protagonist's imagination, and it's true that's probably the only way it could be since he didn't get to know them much in real life, even his best friend, but maybe they could have come out stronger as representations of other people in his life and he could have dealt with older traumas or experiences, not just a constant loop of his last days alive.

This film has great locations, but that's really the only good thing about it. Right from the start I was really annoyed by the terrible acting, so over the top and hysterical. I don't know why some people have called it a masterpiece and influential or even poetic, maybe they haven't seen "The seventh seal" (1957) by Ingmar Bergman, which deals with similar themes and in a much more masterful and poetic way. Also "El Topo" (1970) by Alejandro Jodorowsky would be a much better film to watch instead of this one. The "poetry" and songs in this movie didn't add any depth for me, along with the poor and theatrical imagery they just felt shallow and random, they don't feel like dreams or part of some strange apocalyptic world, they feel too staged, all actions and dialogues are carried out with too much predetermination, with no emotion or purpose. The clothes and different accessories seem out of place, they don't make any sense with the locations. I think the only moment that felt more natural was the scene with the kid in the ice. Nico's singing is powerful, but the lyrics are horrible. Whatever meaning this film has it's not within it and it's funny the director would forbid subtitles, as if it would make it more meaningful or mysterious. A short-film could have been more interesting.

The movie starts very slowly, introducing redundant and shallow information. Right away I felt that the whole story was approached with too much knowledge of Vincent's story acquired many years after his death, as if the characters already knew everything about Vincent and how important he became, so nothing felt mysterious or as if the main character would be really in some kind of adventure or mission. There was nothing at stake, so there was nothing driving the story. It was just like a museum tour and worst part is that is there's really very little about Vincent here when so much could have been shown.

It's hard to understand why the story starts after Vincent's death while it constantly depends on flashbacks which I really don't see why they have to be black and white, by the way, it's too cliché, just like the dialogues which are very basic, unnatural and modern. All the conspiracies and rumors really bored me, it felt like they were trying too hard to create some kind of tension or drama, but it just seemed theatrical along with the stiff and overreacted performances. There's no character development. The camera movements also kept throwing me off, they felt too modern and dragged the scenes unnecessarily. This kept telling me I was watching filmed footage that had been later rotoscoped and it was hard to appreciate the "art" beyond the technique. In some scenes, like when Armand tells Marguerite that he believes Vincent was shot, the lightning seems wrong, the sky is dark and somehow they are illuminated. This happens several times in which the background and the characters don't match.

I agree with SnoopyStyle's comment about how the movie would probably work better as a straight forward film from Vincent's point of view and I think it would actually justify the animated style for the film. It would have been able to show a more poetic and cinematographic universe, maybe something closer to Julian Schnabel's At Eternity's Gate with Willem Dafoe which is also not the best film about Vincent, but I feel it has a much richer cinematography.

I kind of feel bad for the painters behind this film, but their work is also something that didn't convince me. What they did surely is time-consuming, but they merely replicated Vincent's brush stroke and colors while forgetting about composition and how Vincent's paintings were often deformed or not so proportional and realistic or "perfect". For me, this missing imperfection in the film is what makes it lack emotion and life, and it could have given the film much more freedom without depending on camera movements or editing.

The photography is pretty good in general, but I didn't like the use of so many shots in each scene, it just felt messy. The acting is also good, but the script is weak, especially the dialogues. I feel the plot needed a lot more weight. The sickness of the kid doesn't seem bad enough to push the whole story. I mean, we don't see the kid in much pain, he's just asleep and really pale. I think the director focuses too much on the bureaucracy and corruption of the place instead of the humanity there. There's no character development at all, we never find out anything about them and this is crucial when it comes to the relationship between the two kids since it's not clear how much the protagonist cares for his friend or how close they really are. There are always distractions that instead of telling us more about the place or the people there, they just drag the story and keep showing us the negligence of these adults who are supposed to take care of the kids. I don't question the veracity of their negligence, but it was a little hard to believe that even when three or four adults finally start caring about the sick kid none of them checked his body or vitals and all of them repeated he just didn't have a fever. It drove me nuts to hear this like five times. I mean, if someone is really unconscious you try a little harder to make him react. I think the movie needed more characters and points of view to really cover everything the director wanted in a more organic way. I'm sure there are many real stories like this one, and even worse, all over the world, some even include more violence and sexual abuse, but the way it's told and put together just doesn't seem realistic. During the last part of the movie things get better, but I felt they were not very coherent with the early part of the story, especially the protagonist's attitude since he seemed to hate and blame everyone for his friend's situation and the plot twist just felt forced. It was only interesting in the sense that it makes you think it was his fault, but you know the adults are really responsible.

It has a beautiful cinematography and it's mostly what keeps the film running. The premise is brilliant and it's great that it takes the point of view of a Comanche girl, but a few things kept throwing me off. First, the introduction of the Predator is terrible, it really ruins the suspense. When we first see something weird going on in the sky we know it's dangerous and it's more than enough. Then some dialogues feel too modern and the acting, as well, many times very stereotypical. Historical inaccuracies and character inconsistencies are all over the place and while I could easily ignore them, they made me feel I was just watching an action flick: just too many times when something out of nowhere miraculously saved the main character. The ending, which is very predictable, is also very unrealistic. The happy ending is just terrible and it shows the character didn't change at all, that she only wanted to prove she could be a hunter and it feels childish and it instead of making her a woman it's like she wants to be a man, doing man things, instead of following her own path which could have been explored in a smarter way of killing the predator considering that physically, and especially since she had been wounded before, she had no chance of beating him.

It's a great story and great character, but done with a very weak approach, just terrible editing with a mix of crossfades and alternating sequences with no substance or meaning, like the classic cliché of using slow-motion for explosions. It's very repetitive with scenes showing the damage being done to the mountains and the noise pollution or the phone conversations he has with his brother. Also the music goes all over the place, it doesn't have a solid approach, only in the last part of the film it seems to stick to a synthesizer that doesn't really fit at all. I mean, in a way it builds tension, but if this is Ted's point of view (and it is because we experience his fantasies as real as he does) he would probably be against using machines to make music. All this shows there's no particular direction or sensitivity, no point of view, no depth. I think that without all these effects and post-production paraphernalia it could be a very powerful film. Sharlto Copley is amazing, but the film doesn't really let him shine. The best scene is probably when he goes to the phone company to make a complaint. Maybe a more organic and natural approach with the music and a minimalist editing or camera work could also make the film better.

Lynch's films have been a great influence on me and I've always tried to enjoy them for what they are and not for what I'd like them to be, that is, considering, mostly, some technical "flaws" or maybe poor taste choices probably due to a low budget or just crazy stuff that seems meaningless at first. But I found such imperfection also beautiful and honest and completely essential to his work. Now, this documentary introduces us to Lynch's childhood, his passion for painting using different techniques and weird materials, and later how it transitioned into films. His childhood memories, which include names and addresses with precision, show us a rather happy world, not the disturbed or dark world one could probably imagine seeing his films, so I wondered where this darkness or inspiration came from and I thought this documentary would try to immerse into it, but it didn't. It's like a traditional objective biography, without covering any of his personal beliefs, inner conflicts, inspiration, motivations or obsessions. Nevertheless, it's a well constructed documentary, it covers his story clearly and shows many of his paintings which are very powerful.

This is the first film I've seen from Alexander Kluge and I had no idea what to expect. As I watched it, my first thoughts were that it had a lot of the French New Wave or was just heavily part of the European Art Cinema—I wasn't very sure when it had been made. The documentary, broken approach seemed interesting and completely burst that bubble of the typical cinematic experience were as a viewer I was almost pushed to be part of.

I really appreciate what films like this did to filmmaking, starting with the very purpose and artistic value of films and their contra-position to the common entertaining commercial product films soon became after they were introduced into an industry. These films were necessary to go back to the origins of film and its true essence. Many films of this era abandoned the classic ways of making films and that's how they got closer to the truth of film. I think movies like "The Bicycle Thief" (1948) or "The 400 Blows" (1959) or "Kes" (1969) achieved to capture life in a very honest way. But I feel soon this achievement got corrupted, became a concept and lost its way and awareness. It led to films that broke all the typical rules of filmmaking and spoke of certain societies and real socio-political situations, but, in my humble opinion, I believe they failed to capture life despite of how spontaneous and realistic they tried to be. They created "rules" from their own anti-rules approach and I feel there was just too much ego and ambition in all this. I believe film is not really about characters, stories, music, places, situations, dialogs, etc.— not even about all of them put together as it is so commonly believed. Film is much more than that. It captures times and truth in an unique way. And, comparing this very idealistic definition of films and the influence of European Art Cinema—and every other movement of that time—is where my opinion about "Yesterday Girl" comes from. I feel, since this kind of films are very authorial, Alexander Kluge, just like maybe Ingmar Bergman when he made "Summer with Monika" (1953), was struggling between what the audience expected and what his inspiration was telling him to do, especially considering this was his first full-length feature. But despite of all this, which is only ideas that have little to do with the film itself, I think this film is a must-see because if you somehow manage to see beyond a few devised attractions here and there, like the shots of people talking to the camera, sudden cuts, alternate editing with images that contrast against the emotional narrative of the main scene, that in my opinion, still have a sort of beauty and awareness, you might see a substantial beauty and poetry, especially towards the final scenes. And also even before that, there are glimpses of Kluge's own vision and sensitivity which I'm now looking forward to watching more in his films.

I ignored IMDb's rating and just watched this hoping it'd be a good film. I was very disappointed. The story seemed interesting and it seemed at first as if it had many undertones and little stories and details—even a certain poetry—, but soon it was all simplified and followed a slow, distant rhythm like some sort of thriller and I started losing interest in the character and his situation.

I could say most of the actors were great, especially Michael Lonsdale, but the rest, including Tahar Rahim, carried a considerable emotional weight throughout the movie, but merely on the surface; it didn't create deep connections with other characters or situations, and that's also how most scenes were.

I can't help to blame the director and the script for all this. The photography was great and the art direction, as well, even when the color palette is extremely rehashed nowadays, because it wasn't distractive and helped create a certain atmosphere. I think the director wanted to create a very epic film—considering it was filmed in 10 weeks in France and Morocco—with a lot of tension and character development, but for some reason, everything ended up cut into bits of it and some under-layers of the story came to the surface and they became so explicit they appear as banal and forced, separating bit by bit from whatever was supposed to be the main truth of this film.

It seemed like the movie was approached from the wrong angle and carried out with the wrong sensitivity and vision, because I fail to understand what it really was about and the concluding texts at the end only make me reinforce everything I have said since I almost didn't bother to read them. But it caught my attention the homage intention of them and it made me rethink of the whole movie again from that perspective. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything new and nothing appeared to have an extra value. If this was a movie about friendship or fighting for a cause, I don't understand why I didn't feel such weight, such connections, such struggle and such sacrifice, because, as I saw it, the characters weren't really risking anything or nothing that mattered to them anyway; when they tried to do noble acts, they looked more like they were just doing it for the hell of it as if they had nothing else better to do.

Instead of seeing "Free Men" in this film, I saw empty men with no passion, no desire whatsoever for life. Stereotypes and victims with no will of their own.

My father told me he had seen this film in 1962 when he was about 9 years old, and I saw it yesterday and although it had some technical problems such as a poor audio quality and a very dirty, grainy film, I enjoyed the warmth and simplicity of the story, it was very human and honest, with a great cinematography and amazing performances.

At first I thought I was going to see a movie for kids, but the camera work, situations and performances quickly dragged me into the story which has a lot of depth both in content and emotionally. Some might say there's a bit of political themes in this film, but it's not really propagandist or moralist at all. I recommend this for anyone who loves films like "Kes" by Ken Loach or "Little Fugitive" by Morris Engel.

I saw this film at Valdivia's Film Festival last week and I loved it. I also met Esmir, he was a really cool guy, very enthusiastic and soulful and talented as well, and you can see all that in this film. It's a great movie, very well directed, superb acting, beautiful photography and perfect choice of music. It portrays a very surreal and psychedelic reality full of depth and emotion. It reminded me of "C.R.A.Z.Y." but this film has its own universe and pace, and it drags you I just wished it had ran a bit longer than 101 min, because I really wanted more, but at the same time I think it works perfectly. I'm not really into Brazilian films, I've seen a few, including "Cidade de Deus", so I could be wrong, but I don't think this movie has that Brazilian essence. Maybe it was because it takes place in a part of Brazil that is not very common to see which is Brazil's countryside. In my experience I've only seen a Brazil with crowded streets, very noisy and hectic, and that peculiar euphoria or enthusiasm all over the place, and this movie shows a completely different world. I swear I just wanna watch it again at least 3 times more.

It is an excellent film.I saw it the first time in Germany and I've seen it a lot of more times,even though it is a very long film. This kind of films prove that movies can also be made outside of Hollywood. It is a piece of art , more than a commercial movie,and that is what makes Petersen such a good director in this film.

I felt I was at that submarine together with those heroic sailors. It's true that they were fighting for the wrong side,but that was the real war.Those men were human beings trying to survive in a war they couldn't understand,but they fought for their country,families and honor. I never saw such a realistic war film.The closest was Saving Private Ryan.

Also Prochnow was great and the rest of the cast,too. Congratulations to Wolfgang Petersen!!!!