SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

M_i_m_i Strange... I like all this movie crew and dark humor movies; but didn't like this one at all! It's awful, horrible and surely not funny at all. Pity cannot do a whole movie plot, disgust either. And it was really boring. Long empty moments fills the movie; it could have been removed. It should have been in another shorter format, surely. Maybe i expected too much from the crew - like saving the movie lol -. It's also filled with overused clichés of characters and situations... I don't get it why people liked it... "Poetry", "hope"; nope 'mam, didn't see anything like that! ^^ All in all, it's empty and crude, pitiful and hopeless. Oh darn this one........

Afracious This is an absurdist dark comedy from Belgium. Shot perfectly in crisp black and white, Benoît Poelvoorde (Man Bites Dog) is on fine form as Roger, the angry, obsessive father of a family in a small, sullen Belgian mining town. Roger is a photographer who, along with his young daughter Luise, visits road accidents to take photos. He is also obsessed with winning a car by entering a competition where the contestant has to break a record - and he decides that his son, Michel, must attempt to break the record of perpetually walking through a door - he even hires an overweight coach to train him. Michel dresses as Elvis and has a spot on a radio show called 'Cinema Lies', where he describes mistakes in films. Luise is friendly with near neighbour Felix, a pigeon fancier. Roger is a callous figure as he pushes Michel right over the limit during the record attempt, which almost results in his death. Interspersed throughout the film are Magritte-like surreal images. It's undeniably charming and well worth your time.

lyn50 Some critics found this film bleak, but for me there was enough good humour and optimism to overcome this impression. For example, the quietly positive and stoic character of the daughter is the still centre of the film, often counterbalancing the unhappy aspects of the setting and plotline. The film is full of original ideas and characters, and the final outcome is not predictable: I felt it could've gone either way.By the way, many reviews I've read mention the effective use of black and white, but the print I saw, shown on the SBS TV network here in Australia, was in full colour.

alice liddell It's wonderful to see that Shane Meadows is already exerting international influence - LES CONVOYEURS ATTENDANT shares many themes with A ROOM FOR ROMEO BRASS: the vague class identity above working but well below middle, the unhinged father, the abandoned urban milieu, the sense of adult failure, the barely concealed fascism underpinning modern urban life. But if Meadows is an expert formalist, Mariage trades in images, and his coolly composed, exquisitely Surreal, monochrome frames, serve to distance the grimy and rather bleak subject matter, which, Meadows-like, veers from high farce to tragedy within seconds. There are longueurs and cliches, but Poelvoorde is compellingly mad, an ordinary man with ordinary ambitions, whose attempts to realise them are hatstand dangerous; while individual set-pieces - the popcorn/pidgeon explosions; the best marriage sequence since THE DEAD AND THE DEADLY - manage to snatch epiphany from despair.