Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

octopusluke Unable to snap up a ticket for this during Berlinale Film Festival (where it also won the grand prize), I've been itching to see Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire) for quite some time now. The latest from veteran Italian duo, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Padre Padrone, Kaos), it's a documentary-fiction hybrid observing the rehearsals and final performance of William Shakespeare's Roman masterpiece 'Julius Caesar'. What makes this movie noteworthy is it's idiosyncratic formalities: the play is being performed from Rome's high security Rebibbia Prison, and the players are it's incarcerated residents: an ensemble cast of murderers, drug dealers and thieves.The brothers waste no time with needless exposition on the inmates' backstories or crimes. Instead, the pair focus, with brutal proximity, how these criminals connect with the words of "The Bard". Aside from the final, veracious performance, it's all shot in stylised black and white, as we see the production being set up, the rehearsals in the prison courtyard, and the delicate moments these wrongdoers spend behind cell bars. As is often the case with the Taviani's back-catalogue, there's moments filmed in tender close-ups; loading objects such as an empty chair or a wooden sword an implausible subtext.That meta-narrative carries over to the inmates themselves, and ends up confusing us. Not only are they performers in the Shakespearean sense, it quickly becomes clear that they are being presented as poetical cyphers of their real life criminal selves. It's a shameful attempt at allegory – expressing how the elder words of Shakespeare relate to contemporary penal society, and in doing so removes any sense of empathy we would have otherwise had for the inmates.Although the "play-within-a-film" gimmick is a good one, it's hardly original (Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Canadian filmmaker John Greyson's Lillies are both really worth a look). It's also not the best part of Caesar Must Die. With such astounding performances and beautiful adaptation of Shakespeare's words, one wishes that the Tatvianis abandoned the ostentatious stunts and luscious monochrome display, and instead focused plainly on documenting these ostracised people. An extraordinary, grotesque bunch, who find happiness, solidarity and hope in creative expression.Read more reviews at www.366movies.com

sandover The film struck a queer tone that was hard to pin down at first: modest but deceptively so, economic in its time and almost elliptic but yet not quite so, with chunks of life jumping into the rehearsals in an amateur, tongue in cheek, failed way - was this the point? What were the directors trying to do with this film? For as a paradigm of condemning power or exposing with the jarring effect art has the discontents of power this does not work.So what to do with this film? I think the Taviani bros knowingly or not took Six Characters in Search of an Author and turned it into some kind of Six Sentenced Men in Search of an Other, taking Pirandello's theatricality and sophistry and by pushing it to the extreme, to an alienating, subversive context, this would turn the black glove inside out stark white like in the superb cinematography. It is as if Pirandello and Brecht meet: we have the right amount of what was once called 'alienation' and the Pirandellian both sides of the argument, but this is unworkable. It makes irony or simplicity forced and in the very end the "discovery of art that turns the room into a prison" makes for sloppy humanism instead of pungent, elusive and political irony. In a perpetual state of emergency, when remembering the pure, ideological category of - ah! - life before, or after, or now, this turns you into a bad actor and not simply an amateur one as the film showcases.

okay b This movie was extremely disappointing! Perhaps because I had high expectations after reading about the number awards it had won. I thought there was an obvious opportunity lost to create a richer narrative by delving deeper into the backgrounds of each of the inmates and then relating it back to the play. At the start they introduce each player along with their crimes committed. I was curious to find out what had convinced them to decide to audition for the play in the first place and what participating in play meant to them personally. Though there were hints of this for example when the inmate who plays Brutus has a momentary pause about how a line in the play conjures a memory of an exchange with a friend from his past, this moment is brushed immediately aside and the actors continue to rehearse.Though film depicts the passion of the inmates to excel as players well, the lack of dimension in the overall story made the film very unsatisfying.

Jan Grunow I saw the world premiere of this movie at the Berlinale, where it won the golden bear last night. The movie is not bad, but also not special. The basic idea -real prison inmates play Shakespeares "Julius Caerar"- makes the movie interesting and the impressive acting makes you often forget, what fate those men face and what brought them to prison (murder, mafia-crimes etc). But since you know all that from the promotion already, the movie sometimes just leads up to watching an old Shakespeare-play, which we also already know. Just some philosophic aspects (at the end) and the idea of not showing the actual play, but the criminals only practicing it most of the time, is very entertaining.