I have to admit that in general the film’s rather placid, stately, fantasy style can be exasperatingly inert... [But] there are some startling images and the film has a distinct, odd flavour of its own.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 25, 2024

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 24, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 17, 2011

| Original Score: D+ | Sep 7, 2011

...a movie that not only expected me to pay attention, it assumed that I could.

| Feb 2, 2009

The girl and the hospital patients and staff also turn up in his improvised adventure, extravagantly garbed by costume designer Eiko Ishioka.

| Dec 17, 2008

Tarsem has found a home for his endlessly unique visions, and (wouldn't you know?) it's beyond artifice and stealing toward art.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 18, 2008

| Original Score: A- | Oct 18, 2008

The film may look a treat in a static kind of way but the whole is a piece of turgid pictorialism that ends up unbearably dull.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 3, 2008

It veers towards sentimentality at times but the leads' terrific performances help ground this original and thoroughly enjoyable tale.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 3, 2008

The Fall is hugely ambitious, but ultimately it's just an intriguing folly.

| Oct 3, 2008

Does The Fall amount to anything more than a vast sugar-frosted folly? I'm not convinced it does, although its wanton extravagance is not without charm. Singh has money to burn and he builds a pretty bonfire.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 3, 2008

The visuals that illustrate the fairytale fantasy are extraordinary. But the film has none of the menacing brilliance of Pan's Labyrinth. The result is a triumph of style over talent.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 3, 2008

The pacing drags and the clichéd tussle between childhood innocence and adult disillusionment can only go one way. Better to experience it than think about it, fair to say.

| Original Score: 3/6 | Oct 3, 2008

Tarsem's film is breathtakingly imaginative, but at times you're left feeling like you've eaten too many sweets.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 3, 2008

Pace and Untaru generate an unforced chemistry that makes them pleasant company for a couple of hours, but they almost work against the movie's need to establish narrative tension. They appear to be having such a good time that Roy's self-destructive impu

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 30, 2008

An achingly beautiful movie and a triumph of location scouting, with more cosmopolitan spectacle than the past three Indiana Jones and James Bond movies combined.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 30, 2008

The Fall is a technically dazzling film that instantly gratifies the eye, but falls short of appeasing the head or the heart with its visual excesses.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 30, 2008

A bewitching movie, rich in ideas and humanity, and it reminds us that fiction is real to the one who imagines it. Adults might read with detachment, but kids know the truth: It matters who lives and who dies in a story. It matters for them, and for us.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 30, 2008

The Fall may indeed stumble at times, and it's certainly hard to categorize. But it's also exhilarating in reach and vision while admirable in execution. If only more films aspired to such wonder.

| Original Score: B | May 30, 2008