Pic is somewhat cerebral, being mainly helped by the fresh playing of the cast, especially Yank actress Dawn. Color is excellent, and director Marcel Camus gives this movement. (Review of Original Release)
Black Orpheus(Orfeu Negro)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Brazil, France, Italy · 1959
Rated PG · 1h 40m
Director Marcel Camus
Starring Breno Mello, Marpessa Dawn, Marcel Camus, Fausto Guerzoni
Genre Drama, Fantasy, Music, Romance
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In this retelling of the Greek legend, young lovers Orfeu and Eurydice run through the favelas of Rio during Carnival, on the lam from a hitman dressed like Death and Orfeu's vengeful fiancée Mira and passing between moments of fantasy and reality.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Washington Post by Ann Hornaday
A riotous, rapturous explosion of sound and color, Black Orpheus is less about Orpheus's doomed love for Eurydice than about Camus's love for cinema at its most gestural and kinetic.
This sort of thing was considered high art not so long ago; now it seems forced and ponderously symbolic.
Village Voice by Michael Atkinson
Camus's film remains a revivifying experience - and a mid-winter oasis. Born and bred in France, Camus made other films, and lots of French TV, but Black Orpheus may still be the greatest one-hit-wonder import we've ever seen.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
A film that art-house audiences in 1959 loved madly. And who can blame them? A buoyant, searingly colorful retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in Rio de Janiero, writer-director's Marcel Camus' movie is a romance heightened by its backdrop.
This is a movie about the marriage between sound and image, and the sound is wearing the pants in the relationship.
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