80
Ultimately, psychotically inventive pic is a formidable addition to the ever-evolving Maddin oeuvre.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
There's a new visual idea every second, each teeming with energy, pitch-dark comedy, and inspired cinematic lunacy.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Frank Scheck
The results are always visually arresting, while the narrative, even by Maddin standards, is completely out in the ozone.
100
What's truly extraordinary about this movie--which strikes me on two viewings as Maddin's masterpiece--is that it not only plays like a dream but feels like one.
100
New York Daily News by Jami Bernard
It's said to be an autobiography, but that pertains only in the loosest sense. It's a comedy. It's a 1920s silent movie. It is practically indescribable. And it is pure genius.
60
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
The overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.
70
Oddly, once removed from the museum setting and strung together into an hourlong feature, it's Maddin's most cohesive narrative.
80
The New York Times by Manohla Dargis
There is also something rather splendid about this extended-play peep show, as if Mr. Maddin had stumbled across a hitherto lost archive of cinema's less-than-innocent past. What makes all this nostalgia for a movie history that never happened is that, as is always the case with Mr. Maddin's work, it's executed with more love than irony and not a whit of derision.
67
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by Paula Nechak
If you're a fan of Maddin's expressionist style, you'll find the humor within. Everyone else will be scratching their heads, despite Maddin's extraordinary visual imagination.
80
Abortion, incest, infidelity, revenge, and hockey collide at a fever pitch, juxtaposed with such frantic energy that they're pushed to the level of high comedy, funniest at its most dramatic.