Movies
Weekend Box Office
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Wide Releases
Now In Theaters
76
(500) Days of Summer
49
2012
60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
70
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
52
Blind Side
47
Box, The
61
Capitalism: A Love Story
55
Christmas Carol, A
43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
34
Fourth Kind, The
41
G-Force
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
28
Pandorum
58
Pirate Radio
39
Planet 51
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
46
Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Limited Releases
Now In Theaters
58
(Untitled)
96
35 Shots of Rum
56
Adam
39
Adventures of Power
66
Afterschool
73
Amreeka
49
Antichrist
76
Baader Meinhof Complex, The
86
Beaches of Agnes, The
71
Big Fan
65
Black Dynamite
76
Bliss
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
44
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
Bright Star
76
Broken Embraces
70
Bronson
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
60
Collapse
82
Cove, The
75
Crude
82
Damned United, The
53
Dare
50
Defamation
67
Departures
70
Earth Days
85
Education, An
55
Endgame
88
Fantastic Mr. Fox
31
Fix
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
xx
From Mexico with Love
28
Gentlemen Broncos
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo
63
Horse Boy, The
74
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
43
Little Traitor, The
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
46
Love Hurts
84
Maid, The
45
Mammoth
75
Messenger, The
55
Missing Person, The
59
More Than a Game
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
48
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
26
Oh My God
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
79
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73
Red Cliff
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
65
Skin
41
Splinterheads
42
Staten Island
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
58
Storm
82
Sun, The
49
Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
73
That Evening Sun
61
Trucker
49
Turning Green
83
U2 3D
45
Uncertainty
67
Visual Acoustics
32
War on Kids
67
Way We Get By, The
65
Wedding Song, The
xx
White on Rice
59
William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
74
Woman in Berlin, A
43
Women in Trouble
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
My Winnipeg
Universal acclaim
Based on 24 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 12 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
George Toles
Guy Maddin
Directed by: Guy Maddin
Release Date:
Theatrical: June 13, 2008
Running Time: 80 minutes, Color
Origin: Canada
Summary
RATING: Not Rated
Starring Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin, Brendan Cade, and Wesley Cade
Have you ever wanted to relive your childhood and do things differently? Guy Maddin casts B-movie icon Ann Savage as his domineering mother in attempt to answer that question in My Winnipeg, a hilariously wacky and profoundly touching goodbye letter to his childhood hometown. A documentary (or "docu-fantasia" as Maddin proclaims) that inventively blends local and personal history with surrealist images and metaphorical myths, the film covers everything from the fire at the local park which lead to a frozen lake of distressed horse heads to pivotal and factually heightened scenes from Maddin's own childhood, all laced with a startling emotional honesty. My Winnipeg is Maddin's most personal film and a truly unique cinematic experience, winning the best Canadian film at the Toronto International Film Festival and the opening night selection of the Berlin Film Festival's Forum. (IFC Films)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
TV Guide Ken Fox
So it should come as no surprise that what Maddin eventually produced is a film about HIS Winnipeg, a psychological terrain that's no more -- nor less -- "real" than William Carlos William's Paterson or Marcel Proust's Combray.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Both the definition of ''my'' and the definition of ''Winnipeg'' become profoundly fluid in this exquisite ''docu-fantasia'' (Maddin's term), an entrancing riffle through the olde curiosity shoppe of the filmmaker's psyche.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
(1) Shot for shot, Maddin can be as surprising and delightful as any filmmaker has ever been, and (2) he is an acquired taste, but please, sir, may I have some more?
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
Maddin talks at length about Winnipeg's hidden layers, but what makes My Winnipeg perhaps his best film to date is that so much of it is right out in the open.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
Hilarious for those on Maddin's mad wavelength and more varied than his strictly fictional features.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
This haunting phantasmagoria of a film -- comic, singular, surreal -- is not only something no one but the Canadian director could have made, it's also a film no one else would have even wanted to make. Which is the heart of its appeal.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Mock-heroic yet still lyrical, faux-mythic but honest too, uniquely and absurdly and often hilariously Canadian, My Winnipeg is like no documentary you've ever seen.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Deeply personal, wryly funny and fantastically cinematic.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Ann Savage, the femme fatale from a slew of old Hollywood noirs, is savagely funny as Maddin's beauty-parlor proprietress mom.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Maddin's Winnipeg is a rich, funky, funny stew of fears and desires, of mangled civic chronology mashed up with hothouse private emotions. This is a secret history, and it's a wonder.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
It's sometimes uneven, but it's glorious, too, with constantly churning invention and the guarantee that you have never seen anything like it before -- unless it came from Winnipeg and Guy Maddin.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
The movie is dominated by Maddin's usual black-and-white photography, silent-movie syntax, and deadpan melodrama.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Philip Kennicott
Maddin has called his new film a "docu-fantasia," and it's an apt label for an entirely idiosyncratic mix of local myth and history, dubious science, salacious gossip, personal rumination and endless camp humor.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Matthew Sorrento
The faux-doc/tone-poem hybrid My Winnipeg is a worthy product.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
Like all poetic inward journeys, My Winnipeg is likely to resonate with sympathetic viewers in unexpected ways. In viewing his apparently placid prairie city, and his apparently placid prairie childhood, as an intensely symbolic landscape of mystery and terror, Maddin invites all of us to view our own equally ordinary lives in the same light.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
This autobiographical meditation is seductively funny, as well as deliciously strange, and hauntingly beautiful, as well as stream-of-consciousness cockeyed.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
My Winnipeg is overloaded and digressive--it comes with the territory--but it's also grounded in a place, Maddin's Manitoban hometown, and it's painfully engrossing.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
In the course of this clanging, spectral memoir, all of the artist's previous movies--from his underground mock epic "Tales from the Gimli Hospital" through his faux–Soviet silent "The Heart of the World" to his period spectacular "The Saddest Music in the World"--come to mind.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
Maddin's real point -- and, for admirers of this brilliant and idiosyncratic artist, the true source of the movie’s interest -- is that Winnipeg explains him.
Read Full Review >New York Post V.A. Musetto
Guy Maddin's films are always delightful, but his latest, My Winnipeg, has an added treat for film buffs: It features Ann Savage!
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
It's a twisted but beautiful love letter to a city, not factually correct but emotionally true.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
The best way to take this film is with a box of popcorn and a grain of salt.
Read Full Review >Variety Eddie Cockrell
Though it may feel undernourished to the faithful, Winnipeg is an easily digestible meal, for the uninitiated and fans alike.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.1 (out of 10) based on 12 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Chris P. gave it a7:
It's watchable and amusing, but incomplete as a work of art. Maddin's voice-over narrative has some witty quips but deflates rather than fueling the romantic/mythic/dreamlike emotional energy he's trying for. The best sequence in the film is a silent recreation of a seance in the Legislature; only for these few minutes is the film allowed to speak for itself and achieve some real emotional impact. For such a visual director, he repeatedly violates the "show me, don't tell me" rule, so that the visuals and narrative don't add to each other but just run side by side, and that loosely. Also surprisingly, there are too few visual ideas in the film; Maddin keeps showing us the same image over and over long after the point has been made. There's some brilliant editing, but the style of the film is monotonous; intensity comes in random fits and starts, but never achieves any momentum or arc. Narratively, there's no insight what makes Winnipeg tick or why its city council makes the famously bad decisions it does, nor why Winnipegers allow those decisions to happen and nurse the feelings of betrayal that they do. Maddin's ironic detachment functions more as a self-protective mask than as an opportunity for critical reappraisal of the sentiments he's expressions. Overall, the whole thing comes across as fairly masturbatory (metaphorically speaking, although there is some fairly cliched stuff about sexual repression in here); one is tempted to think the director isn't interested in anyone's emotions but his own, and is not much in touch with those. There is a lot of potential in this film (it might have worked brilliantly as an all-silent film) but it's an unfinished and art-schoolish, not the work of a mature artist.
Bryan R. gave it a10:
WOW! Guy Maddin is filmmaker who hasn't has his vision stomped by TV or Hollywood -- like the last living real movie director cringing in an ice cave in Canada of all places!
sally w. gave it a7:
The sleepwalking theme was very strong and both myself and my boyfriend fell asleep half way through. I give it 7 for the part I did see. I liked the soap 'on the ledge', must catchu up with it sometime. Is Guy Maddin a hypnotist?
Missy H. gave it a4:
I felt as if I too were sleepwalking, a theme in this over long film. A 20 minute documentary on the very interesting though questionable subject would have been enough. A feature...not!
Michael S. gave it a10:
Guy Maddin's movies make me feel alive. I feel surges of happiness and melancholy like I'm on a great new prescription. What a ride Guy, thanks for the Art baby.
Lawrence T. gave it a9:
Very ingenious and creative without being pretentious ... I love this director and am glad that I newly discovered him ... I look for more from him to be just as intriguing .... I highly recommend this film.
Jb E. gave it a10:
Absolutely hilarious, though certainly not for everyone. i recommend it to anyone with a sense of the surreal and a sense of humor, or anyone remotely connected with central Canada.
