Popular reviews

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★ 2

  52/100

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  Shut the hell up

  (Seriously, though, the copious onscreen text…

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★½ 3

  the first 40 minutes of Gomes' final segment are up there with (or surpass) the most rapturous filmmaking of his life. not coincidentally, they're also the most explicit and plot-driven of the trilogy... drawing broad connections to Pasolini's TRILOGY OF LIFE.

  and then. the. fucking. CHAFFINCHES.

  because the purpose and position of the film is so blunt, it invites a nearly inscrutable subtlety and abstraction into the individual episodes, and the chaffinches take that to its illogical conclusion. chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches chaffinches

  when they return to the chaffinches, it almost feels like Gomes is trolling us.

  (perhaps unsurprisingly in a series as unpredictable as this... the dedication at the end really brings everything together).

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  Review by ˗ˏˋ Liam ˊˎ˗ ★★★

  and i firmly believe in sayombhu mukdeeprom supremacy

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★½

  Miguel Gomes is a troll which is probably why this is my favorite part of the trilogy. It is the section that goes serious about things that really matter to Gomes, the question about what means to be a natural storyteller at this moment in Portuguese history and the ultimate isolation he feels and those annoying Chaffinches just allow him a way to connect that the previous tales never do. My friend Helio mentioned that the king should have executed Scheherazade by day 520 and he probably should but I applaud Gomes for just following the muse as far as it takes as dull as most of it was. I confess I crack a big smile when it turn out the chinese woman story was just a quick diversion and we were back to those damn chaffinches again, what can I say I dig perversity for perversity sake.

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★★

  I swear to whichever deity you choose that I'm not trolling here, but this is my favourite one of the series. Why? I mean, common consensus is that this is where Miguel Gomes's trilogy on Portugal in an age of austerity collapses in a heap of chaffinches. But there are several reasons why The Enchanted One was a better capper for the trilogy than I was hoping for.

  Firstly, chaffinches are brilliant. I can understand how even the most ardent fan of the chaffinch might think The Enchanted One delivers a bit of a surfeit of chaffinches, but for me it never got old. Part of this is because it's always fascinating to hear people talk about their passions; the…

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  Review by Josiah Morgan ★★★★½

  To begin a review of the final volume in Miguel Gomes already-infamous trilogy I suppose I may as well begin by speaking about what everyone wants to know: the widely-hated chaffinch sequence - and indeed it is not the turn-off point that everyone has built it up to be, in fact it's the most consistently engaging sequence of events in a film made up entirely of sequences of events; rivaled perhaps only by the whale story that closes Volume One.

  What Gomes achieves most successfully is not in the osmosis of his film into wider culture, but in the osmosis of wider culture (that of Portugal, at least) into his film: I know nothing about Portuguese history and I still…

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  Review by DJ_Keyser ★★½ 2

  The final part of this triptych from Miguel Gomes draws this tale of tales to an underwhelming conclusion. Reading through other reviews, it seems many took exception to the ‘chaffinch saga’, but for mine it was the most interesting section of the film. I found myself transfixed by the song-bird calls, unfortunately unable to make the same claim for the first half of the film. The most disappointing aspect of this film, however, was the overabundance of and reliance on on-screen text to handle almost all of the concluding exposition. I fear that this version of Arabian Nights would have seen desecrated virgin heads rolling in the morning.

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  Review by PUNQ ★ 2

  As I said after watching the first volume of this trilogy. I'm sure there is a relevance here, just not for me. The 3rd volume just feels half-assed. The 2+ hours consists mainly of people just standing around while random texts from Arabian Nights comes on the screen. Not my kind of stimulation.

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  Review by Rti03 ★½

  ”As the national anthem started playing, Scheherazade grew quiet”

  Miguel Gomes is Portugal’s most talented, exciting film-maker working today without a shadow of a doubt. Here we have a man whose work is flawed but distinct, and that’s one of the reasons why he has gotten so much success, especially abroad. So for that reason Arabian Nights was one of my most anticipated features of the year; maybe that’s also due to some patriotism but also because the film sounded legitimately innovative and ambitious. Gomes was going to depict what I and my fellow man had been going through in this last half a decade or so, in a different fresh fashion I hoped.
  My general excitement was even more…

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★ 7

  This literally caused me physical pain.

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  Review by Simon Ramshaw

  GODDAMMIT GOMES

  I DO A LITERATURE COURSE

  I DON'T COME TO THE CINEMA TO READ

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  Review by Ruiž ★★★★ 1

  الترجمة العربية للثلاثية:

  الجزء الأول:
  subscene.com/subtitles/arabian-nights-volume-1-the-restless-one/arabic/2728637

  الجزء الثاني:
  subscene.com/subtitles/arabian-nights-volume-2-the-desolate-one/arabic/2728638

  الجزء الثالث:
  subscene.com/subtitles/as-mil-e-uma-noites-volume-3-o-encantado/arabic/2728639