Pictures of Ghosts | Telescope Film
Pictures of Ghosts

Pictures of Ghosts (Retratos Fantasmas)

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The classic movie palaces that once graced Downtown Recife in the 20th century have largely vanished, leaving behind an urban landscape transformed into an archaeological site. Here, remnants of a bygone era offer insights into life that has faded into obscurity.

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What are critics saying?

100

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

Love suffuses Pictures of Ghosts, a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home.

91

IndieWire by Guilherme Jacobs

This nostalgic and melancholy trip is also a celebration.

90

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Alison Willmore

Pictures of Ghosts is so lovely and alive that, if anything, it only reassures you that movies aren’t going anywhere.

88

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

The one constant of life is change, and our own individual relations to the place we grew up, or came of age, in are invariably complicated not by just the alterations in the landscape but the way our perspectives shift...The Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho understands this feeling just as well as I and maybe you do, and he’s made a lovely, enveloping film about it, called “Pictures of Ghosts.”

85

The Daily Beast by Nick Schager

Pictures of Ghosts isn’t a timeline but a winding journey through remembrances of things past, and it moves with entrancing gracefulness through a history that’s near and dear to Kleber Filho’s heart.

81

Paste Magazine by Andrew Crump

Filho is self-reflective, not self-obsessed, and his clear-eyed stance is crucial to the anti-vanity he brings to his examination of his childhood home and youthful obsession.

75

Slant Magazine by Brad Handford

As always with Kleber Mendonça Filho, to reflect reality isn’t enough, as cinema has to find its own truth, even if it takes some imagination to get there.

60

The Guardian by Phil Hoad

[A] somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time.