Met Summer Encore: Les Contes d'Hoffmann

Theatre as cinema. The Tales of Hoffmann captures the stage from angles an audience member could never see. Yet, rather than be an entirely film-centric adaptation, The Tales of Hoffmann doesn't hide its theatricality at all. The sets are abstract and incomplete, creating…

Darren Carver-Balsiger

watching shearer dance is like watching dietrich raise her eyebrows, hayworth take off her gloves, maybe even bergman averting her gaze. a gorgeous, absurdly creative film.

Diogo Serafim

aka Curb Your Enthusiasm Had a rare flash of foresight and decided to read the opera's plot synopsis before the movie, and found it (presumably) a lot more rewarding than it would have otherwise been as a result. Far from being just a filmed opera production, instead…

Joe

92th Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch So you all know that stunningly beautiful and haunting long dance sequence in “The Red Shoes”? Now imagine that, but it’s an opera set to the background of a lavishing and splendorous production design, featuring the…

Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine

Moira Shearer dancing makes life worth living. In Technicolor.

Chris Hormann

There's probably something to be said for the depiction of women in this opera-film. One is literally a robot, one is an evil seductress, and one dies from singing. They're not exactly paragons of feminism. And that's a valid flaw, a bone of contention here, but that flaw,…

Sally Jane Black

Powell and Pressburgers’ “Tales of Hoffman” is a work not easily accessible to anything except the senses. But those — it floods with a torrent of light and sound that feels like what Georges Méliès aimed at conjuring in the days when cinema was still illusion.  A nearly…

theriverjordan

To get in the right spirit, I watched this entire film through little opera glasses.

Lance — A Gentleman Doofus

Always think of this anecdote from George Romero, talking about this as his favourite film on the Empire podcast. "It was always available. If you went for one of the popular films you would always be disappointed.  One day it was out and I said 'well whose got it?' and…

Alexei Toliopoulos