Popular reviews

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  Review by nora ★★★ 1

  a poet LITERALLY falling in love with death? the frenchest thing that has ever happened

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★

  80/100

  Cocteau understands dreams, and he also understands how certain effects can be transporting even if they're transparent. The journey to the underworld, for example, plainly has Heurtebise standing motionless before a rear-projected, moving Orpheus, but knowing that doesn't make it seem any less uncanny. (Equally great: Orpheus asking Heurtebise why the latter's hair is blowing around when there's no wind, and being told it's a stupid question.) The oneiric quality beautifully serves Cocteau's inspired reinterpretation of the myth, in which one of the most powerful love stories of all time instead becomes a portrait of the artist's obsession with death, viewed through the rubble of WWII. As with Beauty and the Beast, my only quibble, though a significant one,…

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★★ 8

  My first exposure to the myth of Orpheus was Terry Cavanagh's Don't Look Back, an unassuming little flash game I encountered in 2009 back when I'd sneak on Cool Math Games and Kongregate during middle school. It masked as a surprisingly-difficult and ultra-simplistic platformer wherein the player character, departing from a grave, descends deeper and deeper into a cavern while fighting off harder and harder enemies until eventually conquering Cerberus and Hades to reach, at the dark heart of it all, a spirit. Now the player must ascend out of the hell they have worked so hard to get into but(!) from then on the game changes radically and looking back results in game over as the spirit dissipates. Whereas…

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  Review by Chris 🍉 ★★★★★ 2

  wow..... jean cocteau and jean marais truly were an iconic bisexual french power couple

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

  The Orphic myth recast as one in which the poet's ability to charm death is reciprocal, wherein the artist is closest to death but also capable of transcending it. And really, some of Cocteau's shots will never not be bewildering to me, works of practical effects and clever angling that blow my mind more than the crowded, programmed shot of GRAVITY. I have really got to explore him more in-depth.

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  Review by Laura ★★★★ 2

  this is really what it feels like to dream and to let go of any idea of control. somehow found myself fully engaged, while my own thoughts and vignettes played simultaneously, which made for a surreal experience. i thought i was getting lost in my own world but then got pulled right back in, sort of like looking in a mirror. existing twice, as a form and as a reflection.

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  Review by RupertKnoll ★★★★

  It would make sense that everybody speaks french in hell

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  Review by C4rlo5 ★★★★ 2

  “Look at yourself for a lifetime in a mirror and you will see death at work like bees in a glass beehive.”
  
  The fine line between death and life.

  It’s a variation of the story of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, it enjoys of such an interesting love story that transcends life and death.

  Here you can find the figure of the Death represented as a woman.

  List of movies I watched from Amazon Prime Spain 🇪🇸

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★★ 17

  In both Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, Jean Cocteau's fantasy world is defiantly tactile. Mysteries exist to be touched; to be interacted with; to wreck violence upon the world of the mundane.

  The underworld of Orpheus is a pedantic mix of bureaucracy and fetish club, run by middle-aged men behind desks, conjuring up confessions banged out on dodgy typewriters, whose will is enforced by leather-clad errand boys of death whose motorcycles move effortlessly between worlds. It demands obedience to a murky set of rules, and provides some of its denizens with technology to speak to the world of the living; some may flash in and out of space (and time?), while others are condemned to walk like commoners, relying…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★ 3

  Poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau brings his particularly creative and multidimensional techniques to this adaptation of the classic Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice. Set in Paris during present-day, it follows distinguished poet Orpheus becoming infatuated with the princess of death, played with an extraordinary detachment by María Casares, after initially becoming acquainted when he witnesses the fatality of a young poet and pursues her down into the afterworld when the princess takes the life of his dejected wife.

  This reconceptualisation is a winning combination of the contemporary and the antediluvian; delivering the embellished mastery of converting the commonplace into the extraordinary. The implementation of the regularly encountered consequences of World War II together with a musical score by Georges Auric,…

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  Review by Zach ★★★★ 1

  Dead Poets Society (1950)

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 2

  Cocteau uses his "astonishing" cinematic abilities to merge magical elements and catchy technical camera tricks to confirm himself as a poet, constructing an extraordinary contribution to fantasy in cinema and one of the rarest tragedies ever shown on the big screen. The core of Cocteau's poetry is love and its overwhelming power, even capable of destructing the borders of Death. Just beautiful...

  97/100