Critic Reviews
| 100 |
Village Voice
What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one.
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| 100 |
New York Daily News
It's said to be an autobiography, but that pertains only in the loosest sense. It's a comedy. It's a 1920s silent movie. It is practically indescribable. And it is pure genius.
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| 100 |
Christian Science Monitor
There's a new visual idea every second, each teeming with energy, pitch-dark comedy, and inspired cinematic lunacy.
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| 80 |
The New York Times
There is also something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision.
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| 80 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Abortion, incest, infidelity, revenge, and hockey collide at a fever pitch, juxtaposed with such frantic energy that they're pushed to the level of high comedy, funniest at its most dramatic.
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| 80 |
Variety
Ronnie Scheib
Ultimately, psychotically inventive pic is a formidable addition to the ever-evolving Maddin oeuvre.
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| 70 |
The Hollywood Reporter
The results are always visually arresting, while the narrative, even by Maddin standards, is completely out in the ozone.
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| 70 |
TV Guide
Oddly, once removed from the museum setting and strung together into an hourlong feature, it's Maddin's most cohesive narrative.
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| 67 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
If you're a fan of Maddin's expressionist style, you'll find the humor within. Everyone else will be scratching their heads, despite Maddin's extraordinary visual imagination.
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| 60 |
Chicago Reader
The overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.
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