"A cascade of hidden personal backstories that you feel could extend out to all of humankind."

| Oct 23, 2024

No space in the frame-indeed, no second in Mysteries of Lisbon's very long runtime-is wasted.

| May 31, 2020

An eminently binge-worthy saga filled with excitement, drama, humor, history, beautiful photography and good performance

| May 29, 2020

A sweeping masterwork that stands as a fitting final testament to a towering career.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 6, 2019

One also can't help but be impressed by the sheer effort it must have taken for Ruiz to engage with this amount of material Branco's novel has thrown at him.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 29, 2018

This is a film to lose yourself in. Despite its extremely long running time, it is an utterly intriguing and beautifully-shot labyrinth.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 27, 2018

All these could be seen as gratuitous flourishes of auteur style, but they serve to undermine the naturalistic illusion, to remind us that everything we see is an effect of narration - and perhaps, more than that, of dream.

| Jul 6, 2018

One of the film events of the year. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 8, 2016

A symbol for cinema in times of YouTube. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jun 6, 2016

This is a film of labyrinthine storytelling and cinematic weaves of character and narrative that stretch across countries and time itself...

| Feb 19, 2012

It is four and a half hours long, but it's got enough plot for at least 30 movies.

| Jan 4, 2012

The duration is intimidating, but the time flies by in an engrossing movie that covers three generations over the late 18th and early 19th centuries and deals with themes - chance, identity, manipulation, multiple personality - that recur in Ruiz's oeuvre.

| Dec 10, 2011

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 9, 2011

If you have time, dip in.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 9, 2011

[It reminds] us of Ruiz's gifts with light and colour, his ambitions with narrative, his sometimes interesting, sometimes frustrating remoteness, and his preoccupations with myth, the avant-garde and 19th-century classicism, all at once.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 8, 2011

Offers a Dickensian level of storytelling richness while unfurling the tangled personal history of a teenage boy seeking the truth about his parentage.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 8, 2011

This ber-snooze of a costume epic, based on a Portuguese novel, has flickers of surreal invention like valedictory memory spasms.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 8, 2011

For those with open minds, the cinema of Ruiz offers enormous and unique pleasure.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 8, 2011

The production design and costumes are immaculate, while Ruiz's camera glides around soires, ducks under tables and peers from behind curtains.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 6, 2011

Storytelling of breathtaking scale and grandeur, even if the complex plotting may twist your synapses along the way.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 5, 2011