Recent DVD/Video Releases

sort by name sort by score

68 $9.99
49 2012
50 Armored
53 Astro Boy
66 Bandslam
86 Beaches of Agnes, The
19 Bitch Slap
65 Black Dynamite
53 Blind Side
71 Bliss
24 Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
47 Box, The
51 Breakfast with Scot
44 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
76 Broken Embraces
71 Bronson
58 Brothers
61 Capitalism: A Love Story
43 Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
65 Coco Before Chanel
69 Cold Souls
23 Couples Retreat
75 Crude
81 Damned United, The
54 Dare
61 Dead Snow
27 Did You Hear About the Morgans?
68 End of the Line, The
55 Endgame
47 Everybody's Fine
64 Examined Life
xx Falling for Grace
83 Fantastic Mr. Fox
31 Fix
74 Flame & Citron
xx From Mexico with Love
28 Gentlemen Broncos
64 Gigante
58 Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
72 Good Hair
82 Hunger
17 I Hate Valentine's Day
66 Informant!, The
34 Law Abiding Citizen
54 Men Who Stare At Goats, The
34 Motherhood
34 Ninja Assassin
19 Old Dogs
68 Paris
44 Peter and Vandy
39 Planet 51
86 Ponyo
79 Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
73 Princess & the Frog, The
49 Private Lives of Pippa Lee, The
73 Red Cliff
84 Revanche
69 September Issue, The
84 Seraphine
79 Serious Man, A
36 Serious Moonlight
70 Shall We Kiss?
24 Sorority Row
41 Splinterheads
33 Stepfather, The
50 Stoning of Soraya M., The
47 Time Traveler's Wife
44 Twilight Saga: New Moon, The
83 Up in the Air
65 Vicious Kind, The
69 We Live in Public
65 Wedding Song, The
71 Where the Wild Things Are
43 Women in Trouble
48 Wonderful World

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, The

EMAIL PRINTZeitgeist Films

5.4 User Score:

Generally favorable reviews

Based on 14 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 5 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >

Movie Info

Genre(s): Drama | Foreign | Romance

Written by: Alan Passes
Stephen Quay
Timothy Quay

Directed by: Stephen Quay
Timothy Quay

Release Date:
Theatrical: November 17, 2006
DVD: April 24, 2007

Running Time: 99 minutes, Color

Origin: Germany / UK / France

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

Starring Amira Casar, Gottfried John, Assumpta Serna, César Saracho, Ljubisa Gruicic, Marc Bischoff, Henning Peker, and Gilles Gavois

The breathtakingly beautiful and long-awaited second feature from the Brothers Quay. On the eve of her wedding, the beautiful opera singer Malvina is mysteriously killed and abducted by a malevolent Dr. Droz. Felisberto, an innocent piano tuner, is summoned to Droz's secluded villa to service his strange musical automatons. Little by little Felisberto learns of the doctor's plans to stage a "diabolical opera" and of Malvina's fate. He secretly conspires to rescue her, only to become trapped himself in the web of Droz's perverse universe. (Zeitgeist Films)

Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer 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...

100

Los Angeles Times Kristine McKenna

Those who can surrender to the Quays' poetic logic will find The Piano Tuner to be nothing short of a masterpiece.

Read Full Review >

The New York Times Jeannette Catsoulis

Flaunting elements of "Phantom of the Opera" and "The Island of Lost Souls," the movie, with its haunting, claustrophobic environment, allows the living and the merely lifelike to interact with an eerie beauty.

Read Full Review >

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

The film is about vanity and pride, and the caging of beauty. Its elaborate fabrication has an intoxicating quality that captures the imagination like all good horror stories.

Read Full Review >

New York Post V.A. Musetto

Mainstream audiences will be put off by the lack of a straightforward narrative, but adventurous moviegoers will find pleasure in the hypnotic originality of the images.

Read Full Review >

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Seething with suggestions of perverse pleasures and inchoate horror, this dark fairy tale won't win the Pennsylvania-born, London-based Quay brothers any new fans -- it plays to the converted, and the converted know who they are.

Read Full Review >

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Their film is a fiendishly detailed toy -- the sort found at the back of a forgotten museum -- and while the shadow play it presents is an old and eternal one, you never cease to hear the whirr of the gears.

Read Full Review >

Variety Leslie Felperin

Impresses as a visually exquisite, rigorously intellectual but dauntingly obscurantist fable about automatons, opera singers and herniated desire that will appeal exclusively to arthouse auds with rarefied tastes.

Read Full Review >

Village Voice Karen Wilson

The story--is only important in that it gives the Quays a foundation for their fabulous animated tableaux.

Read Full Review >

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Like a dream, this film is wispy and ethereal; like a nightmare, it lodges in your hindbrain and gnaws away with gleeful abandon.

Read Full Review >

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

The result is a cast of characters who are little better than automatons themselves. This wouldn't be a problem if the rest of the film were as captivating as it was surely meant to be. Instead, the Quays work overtime to make both their story line and images as obscure as possible.

Read Full Review >

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Perhaps the film will connect with those attuned to the Quays' allusive wavelength, much as a dog responds to a whistle. Others won't hear a thing.

Read Full Review >

LA Weekly Tim Grierson

Once the Quay brothers confidently establish their film's astonishing look, they merely repeat their techniques until the images no longer delight or surprise, leaving all too visible the Quays' struggles with the trickier demands of storytelling and character development.

Read Full Review >

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

With the film's hypnotic emphasis on artistry and architecture, most viewers will probably get their satisfaction from the striking visual elements, particularly the stop-motion animation.

Read Full Review >

Film Threat Phil Hall

By the end of the 99 minute running time, there is a terrible sense of been-there/done-that. And for artists of the Quays' caliber, that is a huge mistake.

Read Full Review >

What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 5.4 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Chad S. gave it a4:
Is Adolfo(Saracho Cesar) dead, too? Who knows? "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" is beautiful to look at, but the story is needlessly opaque and arch. Why does Droz(John Gottfried) invite Adolfo to tune his "automotons" if he has it in mind to keep these former lovers apart? Trying to differentiate and identify the multiple planes of existence in this fantastical world is exhausting, and frankly just not worth it. The unique animation that these gifted artists are renown for would've been better served had the narrative not been so off-puttingly obscure. Poetic logic is fine for a short film, but all that enigmatic dialogue, non-linear storytelling, and ambitious editing choices(I think it might be in the early-Russian tradition) becomes a chore to sit through at full-feature length. "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" is purely an intellectual moviegoing experience. There is not a single moment that will elicit any sort of emotion from the viewer.

Margaret L. gave it a2:
The Quay brothers should stick to their original actors, puppets. They seem unable to direct living, breathing people.

James S gave it a10:
This is an amazing, unusual film, worth seeing for the art direction alone. The critics are right that it won't appeal to everyone, and honestly, I don't even know what to compare it to. Maybe that's one of the best compliments I can give to this film. It is extremely original, surreal and exquisitely beautiful.