Mysteries of Lisbon (2011)

Critic Reviews

• Jennie Punter, Globe and Mail

  A sumptuous unravelling of secrets wrapped in tantalizing stories that gradually interconnect the lives of an ensemble of characters who seduce, betray and defend each other in the years surrounding the Peninsular War.

• Bruce Demara, Toronto Star

  Based on the sprawling 19th-century novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, Chilean director Raul Ruiz renders an equally sprawling tale filled with love and war, violence and vengeance and the search for identity.

• Mark Jenkins, Washington Post

  This isn't one of those epics that uses length as a bludgeon. Rather than sweep, the movie spirals, twisting its viewpoint to reveal tales within tales.

• Walter V. Addiego, San Francisco Chronicle

  A sprawling 19th century novel filtered through the mind of a trickster filmmaker, the late Raúl Ruiz, who both delights in and subverts his wildly complex and melodramatic source material.

• Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

  It's a lot. But if you're at all inclined, it's just right.

• Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Chicago Reader

  Despite the running time (an even longer version was broadcast on Portuguese TV), the movie is never sluggish; on the contrary, it's smart, energetic filmmaking that also makes for engrossing entertainment.

• Sean Axmaker, Parallax View

  This is a film of labyrinthine storytelling and cinematic weaves of character and narrative that stretch across countries and time itself...

• Jaime N. Christley, Slant Magazine

  A mixed bag for a career masterpiece, the Blu-ray of Mysteries of Lisbon gets some things wrong in terms of authoring, but Raúl Ruiz's final epic is so enchanting you may talk yourself into not noticing.

• Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Ebert Presents At The Movies

  It is four and a half hours long, but it's got enough plot for at least 30 movies.

• Philip French, Observer [UK]

  The duration is intimidating, but the time flies by in an engrossing movie that covers three generations over the late 18th and early 19th centuries and deals with themes - chance, identity, manipulation, multiple personality - that recur in Ruiz's oeuvre.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  If you have time, dip in.

• Tim Robey, Daily Telegraph

  [It reminds] us of Ruiz's gifts with light and colour, his ambitions with narrative, his sometimes interesting, sometimes frustrating remoteness, and his preoccupations with myth, the avant-garde and 19th-century classicism, all at once.

• Trevor Johnston, Radio Times

  Offers a Dickensian level of storytelling richness while unfurling the tangled personal history of a teenage boy seeking the truth about his parentage.

• Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

  This über-snooze of a costume epic, based on a Portuguese novel, has flickers of surreal invention like valedictory memory spasms.

• Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

  For those with open minds, the cinema of Ruiz offers enormous and unique pleasure.

• David Jenkins, Time Out

  The production design and costumes are immaculate, while Ruiz's camera glides around soirées, ducks under tables and peers from behind curtains.

• David Parkinson, Empire Magazine

  Storytelling of breathtaking scale and grandeur, even if the complex plotting may twist your synapses along the way.

• Norman Wilner, NOW Toronto

  It's all played out beautifully and captured by Ruiz with his characteristically detailed cinematography.

• Liz Braun, Jam! Movies

  The first thing you need to know about a four-hour-plus movie is that you'll probably wish it were longer.

• Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

  It was easy to lose focus and turn off such a sprawling discursive work.

Read all 21 critic reviews