Popular reviews

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  Review by Paul ★★★½ 4

  Peak mansplaining is when the prince begins describing the ocean to a fucking mermaid.

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★½ 6

  Audio-visual joy soup. Sun glittering off of water, slow motion as a way of being, cheap but gorgeous underwater sets, hand crafted theatrical low-budget production design, 70’s folk psychedelica, a sea spray color palette.

  The first half is pleasantly magical, but probably runs a little long. In general, the style is the substance here, which is fine by me.

  This is solid couch-lock cinema. A lovely thing to steep in.

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  Review by 👽 Zara 👽 ★★★★½ 2

  damn why are the czech so fucking good at fairy tale film adaptations

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★ 3

  2nd Karel Kachyňa (after The Ear)

  Collab with Sav! Both of us were missing this from our Collab Film Club watches, a long-running project to atone for our sins of missing various weeks.

  A dreamy experience, one that for the first thirty minutes moves with its own quiet logic as the underwater ballet that is merperson life. Dressed in flowing gowns and sporting the most elaborate headwear known to cinema, it doesn't really go anywhere but it looks fabulous. When the Prince does appear, it's clear he represents something beyond the hermetically sealed world of the underwater, but like all fairytales it's complicated by a harsh slap of reality. I won't spoil it, but it's a pleasant reminder that not…

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  Review by Graham ★★★★ 8

  An underwater hallucination of a 70s Czechoslovakian dream, Malá mořská víla transforms this psychedelic wonderland into an accessible place of silent waves and dazzling pearls.

  Coming from a former country that gifted us the rampant hysteria of Daisies and Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, this little mermaid hails from a place devoid of ocean. A landlocked country in the centre of Europe snuggled up against Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Austria, it could only dream of oceans... and boy, did it dream big.

  Taken from the Hans Christian Andersen fable, The Little Mermaid gets lost inside the fantasy romance of a mermaid's voyage of self-discovery with tales of desire, sorcery and a desperate yearning to be noticed by the one…

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  Review by Ziglet_mir ★★★ 2

  Viewed with the Amazing Edith’s *Collab Film Group*

  The much darker and rightful adaptation of the Hans Christian Anderson tale—no talking sea creatures, no evil witch with tentacles, and no ditties about living underwater. In the way that past Collab film Johnny Corncob is psychedelic, The Little Mermaid is straight-up dreamy. Seeing a film like this always reminds me how underutilized playing film backwards or in slow motion is as a purposeful means to a fictional world. For example, David Lynch masterfully conducts “weird” in the Black Lodge with playing film backwards and George Melies flipped the camera in any direction you could imagine to get some sort of gravitational effect. The Little Mermaid uses slow-motion to justify being underwater—and it’s entirely effective. …

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  Review by laird ★★★★½

  Calling this Czech adaptation of The Little Mermaid dreamy would be an understatement. I'm not even sure I've used that word correctly in the past after watching this hypnotic, slightly undercranked, slightly art-damaged fairytale. The costumes and make-up I can only describe as "drag queen Jodorowsky." Wow!

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  Review by sydney ★★★★

  whoa!!!
  american kid movies are lame af.

  watch: youtu.be/2VCE2PRS-C8

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  Review by Christian Ryan ★★★½ 11

  My wife and I once attended a lavish production of Antonín Dvořák’s opera, Rusalka (based on the same Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale), after winning tickets in a radio station contest. Despite having exactly two nickels to rub together at the time, we were dressed to the nines, in a tux and ball gown, rented on my mom’s “emergency use only” credit card. 

  To the detriment of the esteemed venue’s prestige, we lucked into a parking spot at the front steps of The Queen Elizabeth Theatre, and rolled up in my ragtop clunker, a hand-me-down Mercury Capri, which was less an eyesore than a teal dagger of rusted metal stabbing directly into the socket. Its exterior was a patchwork of…

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  Review by Remobo ★★★½ 2

  First, the white stone, with her hand grows;
  The red stone seals her lips.
  The black stone in her heart remains,
  Like a graveyard of sunken ships

  Beneath the Seven Seas, they live, in their neutral colored gowns
  Seaweed and coral tangled in their hair
  Searching through the belongings of the men who have drowned
  A world of mermaids, and their princess, so fair

  She listens, quite intently, to the tales of a world above
  The brilliant sun and colorful fish that fly
  The day that she sang to the man that she loved
  Just a trick of the sea to his eye

  First, the white stone, with her hand grows;
  The red stone seals her lips.
  The memory in…

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  Review by Liz ★★★★

  Is this… seapunk?

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  Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★★½

  They really handed the little mermaid fish to eat.
  www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VCE2PRS-C8