Popular reviews

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 4

  Greenaway’s The Falls is hysterically deadpan, punctiliously encyclopedic, mockingly difficult, and purposefully rewarding. Taking a formalist approach to absurdism, this 3-hour mammouth chronicles 92 subjects who have been affected by a fictitious phenomenon known as the VUE (or the Violent Unknown Event) in painstaking detail. Equal parts dry mirth as it is stupefying morbidity, The Falls challenges its audience by flooding them with information, daring you to keep up. But this is by meticulous design and upon seeing the film a second time, I realized how much you will soak in with every viewing. Jam-packed with enumerated facts and tidbits pertaining to the aforementioned event and its many affected subjects, the film is impossibly dense and deliberately stratified, yet infinitely gratifying and…

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  Review by Josiah Morgan ★★★★★ 3

  "A film was being made about the Holocaust and the Fallbuts were not surprised to be taken as extras."

  Only recommended to hardcore fans of structuralist cinema and Greenaway completists... but this is a film, and what a film it is, the ideal marriage of comedy and perfectly timed editing to create the backdrop for a wildly varied bittersweet depiction of some unspecified historical event which is at once hilarious and completely heartbreaking, perhaps the funniest movie ever made that seems intent on making people turn it off - this is an incredibly easy film to watch but one that will cater to a niche audience, and to a niche audience only - and I wouldn't have that any other…

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★★★ 6

  8th Peter Greenaway (after The Draughtsman's Contract; The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; The Pillow Book, Windows, Dear Phone, A Walk through H and Nightwatching)

  My thanks to Name Not Given for a copy of this.

  The Falls is a disaster film, a sci-fi in the vein of Octavia Butler, a disability narrative, a playful conspiracy theory and a structuralist masterpiece all rolled in one. It also is the summation of Peter Greenaway's early works and the final break with that artistic style. No longer would he emphasise the non-human as the primary motor of his films, moving towards a more mainstream plot-based narrational style. Whether that was a sensible progression of his art or not is…

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  Review by braden ★★★½

  “At least once every 24 hours, Orchard finds time to drive five miles to the coast, ostensibly to collect the skulls of seabirds”

  Peter Greenaway’s debut feature The Falls is a completely nonsensical, three hour experimental mock documentary detailing the fictional and totally unexplained ‘Violent Unknown Event’ (VUE), told through a series of ninety-two bizarre biographies of the ‘victims’, delivering it’s made up facts entirely in a monotone, serious manner with a very surreal, dry sense of humour. The characters are all shown in the third person, seen in photos or ‘archive footage’ rather than ‘interviews’ as the narrator talks endlessly about the strange effects of the ambiguous event as abstract footage and ornithological imagery plays on-screen, never achieving anything substantial beyond…

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  Review by {Todd} ★★★½

  "Why... why do this?" -Me,

  - Film Club Ranked: boxd.it/3M2sq

  Lots of ornithology... so it's got that going for it.

  Sometimes a movie proves that you can do something but doesn't really justify whether the thing should be done. Peter Greenaway creates a 3 hour and 15 minute fake documentary about sufferers of a condition called VUE. You see ninety-two video profiles... ninety-two! Some of them are mildly interesting and some aren't. It's a lot... and for the first two hours I really disliked this but by the third hour I was fine and by the final fifteen minutes I thought "yes, I'm satisfied with having accomplished this feat and impressed by what has happened."

  The viewer is rewarded for…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 11

  Infinite Nest

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 12

  aka 92 Fragments of a Chronology of Tragedy

  It was not by planning, but by means, time and opportunity that my Greenaway marathon concluded with this film, a travel in time almost 40 years before Eisenstein in Guanajuato, and it resulted in the most optimal appreciation, not of the film, but of the auteur's mind, making almost all intellectual and artistic links that my humble trajectory could possible fathom.

  The Falls is one of the peaks in cinema regarding the fusion between narrative and experimentation in celluloid, but most importantly (to a shocking extent), it is an inflection point in the curve of forms of narrative pathos and cinematic influences. Like a fusion of influences and future inspirations, it is…

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  Review by Evan “Kaizō Haya-shill” Pincus ★★★★★ 1

  "Look around! Just information!"
  -Life Without Buildings, Let's Get Out

  The Falls is over 3 hours of cheeky, self-referential structuralist mythmaking, drawing lines between utter nonsense with mathematical precision, filling in the details of a world wracked by an inexplainable Violent Unknown Event, of which many people believe is the Responsibility of Birds. Greenaway throws information at the viewer at an unrelenting pace, never slowing at all, piling on the data fast enough that you're drowning in it by the time the first hour is over. An alternate history as told by a compiler of conspiracy theories, The Falls is totally unique, absolutely hysterical, and above all, the kind of movie that seems like it was made for people like…

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  Review by 🌻 lindsay 🌻 ★½ 1

  Film Club #61

  I would have the fallsed asleep to this but the music that played between each story was so grating that it jolted me awake every five minutes

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  Review by ❄️ Cammmalot ❄️ ★★★ 4

  Shaggy Dog Story: A lengthy story that derives its humor from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the end resolution is essentially meaningless.

  In what can only be described as an incredibly bad drunken bar bet, Peter Greenaway brings us the world’s longest cinematic Shaggy Dog Story.

  At over 3 hours this pseudo-documentary is filled with formal narration describing absurd biographies of the victims of a mysterious incident called the "Violent Unknown Event" or VUE.

  I think I like the idea of the film more than the actual film, mostly because it’s way too long.…

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  Review by Lencho of the Apes ★★ 23

  Post-modernist whimsy, using numerical play, cataloguing and cross-reference to illuminate micro-elements of a macro-narrative that's presumed to be familiar to an imaginary viewer, but never entirely takes shape to a real viewer. It's likely that there are a nigh-inexhaustible number of connections that can be made within the text (a la Finnegan's Wake) if you examine it with the minutest attention, but that exercise wouldn't lead anywhere, and the pleasure of not solving a puzzle isn't one that can sustain my interest for the duration of a three-hour movie. My engagement with this came to an end after about an hour, when my interest in seeing how many ways Greenaway could allude to birds or to vertigo began to dwindle.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★ 1

  79/100

  Second viewing, last seen 1995. The rare film that has a legitimate claim to being truly sui generis—of the nearly 9000 other features I've seen, only Alexey Fedorchenko's Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari can even be said to inhabit the same ballpark, and those affinities are pretty superficial. A better analogue, perhaps, is the complete James O. Incandenza filmography, if that constituted the body of Infinite Jest rather than "merely" a nine-page endnote. In fact, it would not surprise me at all to learn that DFW had been directly influenced by The Falls, as he employs many of the same gags, including filling out the roster with a multitude of non-entries:

  Found Drama I.
  Found Drama II.
  Found…