Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Crwthod A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

bucksix I consider this movie the most beautiful I have ever seen. It is a complete and total delight to both the ears and the eyes. But its appeal to the heart is what has caused me to watch it many many times. The final scene with the little boy playing the guitar and the other little boy and the girl dancing while the sun rises, gives me a great feeling of hope and always brings on the tears. In fact I am starting to cry right now thinking about it. I can see why some people dislike the film because it has no special effects, crashes, explosions and the like and also the purists who object because it is not done as a Greek tragedy. They have their reasons but I have to admit they are missing something very special.

dlbhina622 I agree with the reviewer who says it is a successful attempt to recreate an old myth in modern times, but take it a step further and add it is a magnificent attempt, one that has not gotten the attention it deserves.As a young adult, seeing it made me look at film story-telling in a different perspective; how an ensemble of actors, with a great screenplay, can take a story written in the clouds and bring it down to earth so easily and realistically. I can tell you that I only had the desire to see it once, but it has stayed with me as one of those enlightened moments, and in black and white, as it should be.I think it is a classic, made at a time when the world was on the verge of transformation, yet not quite there yet, which makes it all the more remarkable.

tomgillespie2002 Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn) arrives in Rio de Janeiro in time for the festival to escape a man whom she believes is trying to kill her. She catches a tram driven by popular playboy Orfeu (Breno Mello), who naturally falls for Eurydice's youthful beauty. Ofeu is engaged to Mira (Lourdes De Oliveira) but is particularly unenthusiastic about the idea, and uses his new pay packet to get his guitar from the pawn shop in time for the carnival rather than to buy Mira an engagement ring. Discovering that Eurydice is staying next door to him with her cousin Serafina (Lea Garcia), Orfeu falls in love with her. But during the carnival, the man Eurydice believes is trying to kill her tracks her down, revealing that he is in fact Death dressed in a skeleton costume and has come to claim her.Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Academy Award and Golden Globe for the Best Foreign Language Feature, Black Orpheus is a rather strange beast, and the surprise victor in a year that saw Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour released. Although it can be argued that these are technically better films, it's not hard to see why Black Orpheus won, as its sheer individualism in its beauty, colour and culture makes it stand out above the rest. Many directors, including Orson Welles, had tried to capture the wonder of Rio's carnival, but French director Marcel Camus somehow manages to place you there amongst the samba and the sun, yet never letting the visuals overshadow this poetic, and actually very funny, re-telling of the Orpheus myth.Perhaps the most popular telling of this story in film is Jean Cocteau's Orphee (1950), the central film to his Orpheus trilogy. Cocteau invested his own ideas of surrealism, poetry and art into his film, and was more re-interpretation than re-telling, and as magnificent as that film is, it does tend to ignore the thing that Orpheus was known for, which is his almost God-like gift for music. Transporting the story to Rio's carnival, an explosion of tribal samba amongst an array of outlandish costumes, writhing bodies, and beautiful women, brings the story to life, and rather than Gods, we have voodoo doctors and fancy dress. It seems strange that Marcel Camus has done nothing of any real note since this film's success, as he somehow manages to juggle neo-realism and fantasy to a stunning degree, and created one of the most memorable films of the 1950's.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Lee Eisenberg Brazil's election as host of the 2016 Olympics creates a really big reason to watch Marcel Camus's "Orfeo Negro" ("Black Orpheus" in English). I had never known the Orpheus myth until I saw this film, and what a way to learn it! Of course the movie's main pleasure is to see Carnaval. In this version, Rio de Janeiro conductor Orpheus (Bruno Mello) falls in love with country woman Eurydice (Marpessa Dawn), but can't forget his relationship with Mira (Lourdes de Oliveira). The bossa nova soundtrack is like a character by itself. To be certain, Antonio Carlos Jobim is best known for "Girl from Ipanema".All in all, this is a truly fine experience. As it turns out, Barack Obama's mother Ann Dunham saw "Black Orpheus" in the theater - before she met Barack Sr. - and it was her first real exposure to black culture.Really great.