✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Spain · 1980
1h 50m
Director Iván Zulueta
Starring Eusebio Poncela, Cecilia Roth, Will More, Marta Fernández Muro
Genre Drama, Fantasy, Horror
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
José Sirgado is a director of horror films who one day receives a mysterious key, audio cassette and reel of film from a filmmaker that he previously met only briefly. He decides to watch the film, and discovers that the mysterious filmmaker has been having strange nighttime encounters with a camera.
A hallucinatory, claustrophobic examination of the secret potency of film itself, it enters the disorienting world of a young film-maker who discovers his camera has a feature he'd never imagined. Taking one right back to those great '70s mood-movies, it's a singular treat. [05 Nov 2003, p.97]
It is a startling film in structure, style and story, but most of all in the simplicity of its plot -- which, once revealed (and that takes a while) is a horror story for cineastes. [03 Feb 1983, p.C8]
RogerEbert.com by Carlos Aguilar
Arrebato invokes cinema as an otherworldly entity that possesses, just as addictive and destructive as mind-altering substances injected into the bloodstream.
A movie completely in the addictive thrall of cinema, unhealthily enamored with the act of creation itself, Arrebato is an unnerving and enthralling fetish empowered by its hedonism: Drugs, sex, beauty, nostalgia and a disillusioned disaffection with them all.
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Its parts recall many later works as diverse as Trainspotting and The Ring, its depiction of addiction and stasis leading us towards a legitimately brilliant ending that brings the whole thing into meta territory with its film-within-a-film coaxing us to enter the fray ourselves.
Austin Chronicle by Richard Whittaker
Even if it beat Videodrome to the screen by two years, it's not quite the same level of must-see programming. It's fascinating, but less coherent, less scathing, and far more meandering.
Three short films that glance at the imaginative aspects of Tokyo life.
A college student pursuing a morbid thesis project finds herself pursued after finding a snuff film among her research materials.
Chronicles the hard and shocking story of life in a British Borstal for young offenders. Banned before ever airing.
A frantic and improbable love story about two young people who belong to different worlds.
She’s everything. He’s just Ken.
A faded television actor and his stunt double strive to achieve fame in the final years of Hollywood's Golden Age.
A biographical drama following Judy Garland as she reminisces about her rise and comes face to face with her fall.
When a young woman, Bella, is reanimated by an eccentric physician, she begins her life anew, exploring the pleasures of the world.