Popular reviews

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 1

  Has Guy Maddin been taking absurdist comedy lessons from Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and their Adult Swim team for the last four years, or..?

  A brilliant, hilarious and utterly batshit-yet-respectful-and-affectionate parody of a variety of genres/subgenres & cinematic eras that Maddin so obviously adores. Here, you can feel, very deeply, his love of film.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★ 4

  80/100

  "Be careful about passing gas when you're in the bathtub. It just doesn't go away!"

  Guy Maddin's Journey to the Center of the Cinema. Volcanoes and wolves and flames and clouds woven through a fossilized digital presentation of a celluloid dreamscape. Various scenarios lead to rituals, tangents, expressions, and grand displays of feeling. Watching this is like discovering a nesting doll in the middle of a rabbit hole which happens to all be occuring in a dream that you're having while you're passed out on the floor of a local Taco Bell. Exquisite yet exhausting cinema that reaches as far down as it possibly can, only to burst into thousands of crumbling pieces as its cinematic submarine rises to the surface. Flapjacks!

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 1

  Welcome to The Forbidden Room, an exhilarating slipstream of two-strip technicolor havoc that feels like an exquisite corpse assembled from every leftover idea that filmmaker Guy Maddin has ever had. A dense quilt of nested scenes that were allegedly pulled from the cinema’s great abandoned films, The Forbidden Room never proves that Maddin is reanimating “real” lost projects, but how real can a film be if it was never shot?

  FULL REVIEW ON TIME OUT: www.timeout.com/us/film/the-forbidden-room

  (i already regret not going with 5... we don't do 1/2 stars)

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  Review by Ben Reiss ★★★★★ 12

  Of course Udo Kier is in this!

  “Hey Udo I’m making a movie it’s weird as-    

  “I’m in!!!”

  All joking aside, The Forbidden Room is weird as shit. It’s only my second Guy Maddin film after Careful and I suspect that starting with these two is kind of like getting into David Lynch by watching Eraserhead and then skipping straight to Inland Empire. It’s a mess. It’s incoherent. It’s the movie equivalent of opening your fridge, pulling out 18 random things that have all expired, putting them in a pot together, and then microwaving the pot. And of course, I LOVED it.

  Let’s start at the beginning (not that that will do us much good). We begin the film…

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  Review by Michael Sicinski ★★★★½ 1

  [9]

  My capsule review from my TIFF Wavelengths coverage for MUBI:

  If The Forbidden Room represents Maddin’s most substantial triumph since The Heart of the World, this could be because the new film is both an inversion and an elaboration on the earlier film’s methods. Where Maddin took a single story (a vaguely Soviet apocalyptic sci-fi lark crisscrossed with a fraternal love triangle) in Heart and condensed it through split-second montage, propulsive music, and exhortative title cards, The Forbidden Room ambles and digresses. Where Godard told us that his Weekend (1968) was “a film adrift in the cosmos,” The Forbidden Room is a film lost inside itself, a mise-en-abyme nightmare of discursive misdirection. Whereas earlier Maddin films have been perhaps…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★ 8

  Wormholes of absurdism. Layers upon layers of abstraction. The Forbidden Room was my first journey into the zonked out, chimerical mind of Guy Maddin—a supreme exhibition in color and design, hypogenic visuals, risible (whether intentional or not) dialogue and nesting doll narrative style—the film combines avant-garde surrealism with silent film techniques and experimental montage, lighting and editing styles to form a nearly-incomprehensible, yet imposingly bizarre piece of fantastical cinema that defies traditional definition or dissection. There were moments that I really enjoyed like the bookending (and occasionally recurring) ‘bathtub man’ bits, the Udo Kier derrière song and dance number and a few other random instances of comedic or oddly dramatic mania. Unfortunately, as a whole, I couldn’t really get into this…

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  Review by 20oldboy03 ★★★½ 2

  English Version below

  
  Gehirnverdrehung an.

  
  In einem U-Boot sitzend erzählt sich die Besatzung im schwindenden Sauerstoff im kappenden Leben ihres vielleicht erfolgreichen Überlebens Geschichten, als plötzlich wie aus heiterem Himmel oder doch eher im Fingerschnipp ein Holzfäller ganz dem Bilde mit Flanellhemd, Hosenträger und Gesichtsbeharrung auftaucht und ebenso Geschichten vornehmlich in englischer Sprache erzählt die mit Überblenden beginnen enden höhergedrehten Farbspektrums in unnatürlich rot, gelb, grün und blau getupfter Pinselstriche mit dem Schwamme nachgeholfen der Einblendung Schriftzug gleich ihrem Vorbild Stummfilmzeit mit Texttafel als Zwischentitel zu XYZ mit dem X wie Udo Kier und dem Y als Mathieu Amalric und endend mit dem Z wie Charlotte Rampling Alter Angestaubt in weiteren Einblendungen gleich Gemälde mit Schriftzug „mir nicht bekannt“ den…

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★★★ 6

  "Please tell me of your experience."

  Likeland #6

  I like your style, Guy Maddin. WOMAN SKELETONS are complicated. Poisoned by leotards is surely second only to the literally toxic blowjob of Michael Findlay's The Kiss of Her Flesh. Some people will just never know how to penetrate the warm pink center of the cave no matter how many tools they're given. Fantasize instead the valcano that dreams the molten dream of justice, Udo Kier haunted by the final derrière (as he should be), making sense of the senseless. Even with self-mastery at last, the hideous impulse incarnate is infinite.

  (Maddin films were built to infiltrate sleep. Imagination has never been lost on me. Don't engage me in conversation about Michael…

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  Review by nick ★★★★

  Remaking lost films from history with his own retro, hyper-stylized touch is probably the coolest thing Guy Maddin has done in his career, and he does it beautifully. While not every story hits the mark, this journey of extreme sensual sensation is unforgettable, marking Maddin's most daring effort to date.

  Dreams inside dreams inside dreams, The Forbidden Room is a giant puzzle that forms and unravels on its own, like a living organism. The sheer bizarreness compensates for the script’s inherent weaknesses, and the giant cast filled with familiar faces shows the support this project received for its innovation and historical significance. Maybe Maddin should have directed Inception.

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  Review by shookone ★★

  Guy Maddin is the Wes Anderson for the bourgeoisie if Anderson wouldn't cover that already accurately, so I guess he's the one for the super elitist art dandies then?!

  instead of a plain yellow production design disaster at least Maddin has a decent material fetishism and experimental desire. also he sniffed some powder of Lynch, so there's that.

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  Review by preston ★★★★★

  Guy 'Madman' Maddin, dreaming his molten dreams like that wrathful old volcano. (But who's Evan Johnson?) Unmoored excitements of a stream-of-consciousness trailer reel, multiple-distilled into doublings, rituals, murders, obsessions. "A wife's water, saved for science." Baroque shards of cinephile sense-memories, suggestive colour-tones, half-remembered splinters of familiar narratives, obloquious irruptions of humour. Our collective movie dream-domain tinted, kneaded, twisted, cheated, alchemised, fragments of the lost-and-rotten cheekily restored, once detritus, now this brilliant windbag's mad phantasmagoria of pulchritudinous putrescence. How do I know this? Ha! People have told me, that's how!

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★½ 1

  "Be careful when you're passing gas in the bathtub...it doesn't just go away!"