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

| 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

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

A sumptuous unravelling of secrets wrapped in tantalizing stories that gradually interconnect the lives of an ensemble of characters who seduce, betray and defend each other in the years surrounding the Peninsular War.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 11, 2011

Based on the sprawling 19th-century novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, Chilean director Raul Ruiz renders an equally sprawling tale filled with love and war, violence and vengeance and the search for identity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 10, 2011

This isn't one of those epics that uses length as a bludgeon. Rather than sweep, the movie spirals, twisting its viewpoint to reveal tales within tales.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 30, 2011

A sprawling 19th century novel filtered through the mind of a trickster filmmaker, the late Ral Ruiz, who both delights in and subverts his wildly complex and melodramatic source material.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 29, 2011

It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 15, 2011

Despite the running time (an even longer version was broadcast on Portuguese 온라인카지노추천), the movie is never sluggish; on the contrary, it's smart, energetic filmmaking that also makes for engrossing entertainment.

| Sep 15, 2011

I got a little lost while watching "Mysteries of Lisbon" and enjoyed the experience.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 15, 2011

The casual way [Ruiz] practices difficult cinema is breathtaking.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 25, 2011

The storytelling is straightforward, with a classical sheen, even as mischief and hallucination puncture the serene surface.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 11, 2011

You can study it, like a painting, and then realize, with a gasp, that it has got hold of you like a fever.

| Aug 8, 2011

[Ruiz] stages the events with an air of intrigue that's amplified by his sly, insistently roving camera and his sinuous, theatrical long takes.

| Aug 8, 2011

The story is nothing if not convoluted. Characters, subplots and overlapping narratives come and go.

| Aug 7, 2011