Listonixio Fresh and Exciting

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Maleeha Vincent It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Edgar Soberon Torchia Whenever John Malkovich is off screen, this turns into an attractive film, an echo of the best Antonioni. The first segment has very beautiful actors doing nothing, the second has Marceau taking her clothes off for Malkovich, the third is completely blank in spite of Ardant and Reno, then there are Moreau and Mastroianni amusing themselves, and finally, the marvelous Irène Jacob stars in the best segment. Tonino Guerra still writes the same dialogues... no wonder people do not communicate! In any case, Wenders should have only helped the old master to do his usual number, instead of introducing his insufferable transitions with Malkovich, and vacuous, fashionable music.

runamokprods A summing up of all the aging, ailing Antonioni's career themes, strengths (visual beauty, a sense of mystery and poetry) and weaknesses (pretentious stiff dialogue, ideas that are sometimes not really all that deep, a penchant for getting beautiful actresses undressed without a lot of justification).But this is also something quite different than he's ever done, in that these are a series of short stories, loosely tied together by sequences of John Malkovich playing a director looking for his next film (Wim Wenders helped the physically limited Antonioni by directing the Malkovich sections). By keeping the pieces smaller, I found this more fun, and more moving than most of Antonioni's films. There isn't the chance for the ideas to run as thin, and there seems to be more empathy for his characters now. Humans may be screwed up, but at least Antonioni no longer stands above them judging. One moment actually brought me near tears. The film captures the lonely enigmatic solitude of the artist, and of life itself.

Eugenia Andino I haven't seen any other films by Antonioni and the people that saw this one with me agreed that it shares themes and imagery with the rest of his works. Maybe if I had seen other stuff by him I would have enjoyed this one, knowing what to expect. I saw it as an almost complete failure for so many reasons. First of all, the film introduces interesting, deep issues about social relationships, feelings, the nature of reality versus fiction, but this is very often done in the clumsiest of ways making the characters speak as if they were delivering speeches, rambling on and on, juxtaposing declarations rather than having dialogues. The scriptwriters seem to be so worried that we will not get the point that they prefer to tell instead of showing. Secondly, the movie has no rhythm, especially in its first half. It is not only that it is slow. Some slow films have been made with an excellent sense of pace and rhythm (El Sur by Victor Erice Or Scorsese's The Age of Innocence are examples I like), but for that to be successful it is necessary that we find the characters so engaging or the story so moving that we can adapt to it. This does not happen in Beyond the Clouds, where the first episode seems to drag endlessly, and the relationship between John Malkovich's "reality" and the love stories "fiction" is at times fluid, others abrupt, others confusing.

mifunesamurai A wonderful cast thrown into modern mystical romances for the intellectual grown ups. Yes, they too need a love story to stir those hidden urges without the Hollywood fluff. This all under the masterful direction of Antonioni and Wenders who both love to pin his characters in exotic locations and have them dwarfed by the surroundings with long wide shots. It is great to see that there is lust in the mid-life crises sector.