Mysteries of Lisbon (2010)

Wow! Such a good movie.

Don't listen to the negative reviews

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I'm not sure it's possible to express a spoiler here -- the film just doesn't have any truly dramatic moments outside of one dueling scene, and even that is pretty uninteresting. It's amazing that someone decided the story needed over 270 minutes to tell. There are many scenes that are totally unnecessary to the story and many more that could have been shortened.There's a point where we see a couple get together, and we expect passion, fireworks, some real emotion. Alas, it is not to be. Way too many scenes are filmed from quite a distance, as if to say, "let's disengage ourselves as much as possible from this". The main effect is to prevent us from seeing the acting going on -- watching several people talking from such as distance, it's hard to tell what anyone is supposed to be feeling.And the pacing. This film is glacially paced, and taxes even the most patient of us. There better be a payoff, but it never comes. I made it to the end, and I can honestly say that I felt like I had wasted my time. There just isn't enough going on in this costume drama to care. About the only good thing I can say is that the production values are not too bad, although it seems that the budget must have precluded much location shooting -- we see coaches going by the same landscape over and over throughout the film.Summary: limp, boring soap.

There are two ways to view a film. One is to accept and endorse the conventional wisdom about the film, and to endorse it because "they" must be right. The other is to judge the film on its merits. "Mysteries of Lisbon" has the following "merits": a simple-minded plot, glacier-like plot development, insipid dialog, wooden acting, murky cinematography, and half-baked attempts to inject surrealist touches (as if these could redeem the film's other failings). I went along with the gag for quite a while before ejecting disc 1 of "Mysteries of Lisbon" and finding something better to do -- which was easy, in the circumstances.

This series of short stories set in a world long gone is of course a costume drama, that may therefore deter some. They would be mistaken. It is slow, considered, colorful and in my view a good introduction to the world of our ancestors, who held opinions different from ours, did things in a different way, and got upset about the same issues, yet in a different clothing. Love that is thwarted, wise padres, noble families with poor youngest children and all of that in a heavily draped world - sometimes a bit much. And yet I may recommend that you sit down, do not hurry, leave your perhaps preconceived ideas at the entrance, and enjoy these so many hours of romantic stories.

This is the most stupid film I've ever seen.Photography, costumes and scenery are beautiful, but the story is utterly pointless! Not to mention that it is one slow and extremely boring film, with plenty of illogical and senseless details and scenes.The characters are also not well developed, we find out about their destinies but there is no point in all that, none of the sub-stories has a conclusion.I don't understand who would have payed for the making of this (probably rather expensive) film and what is its target audience?