Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Branson Reese

  Welles understands something about Kafka that lots of people seem to miss: he's really funny. There's a comic Unreal Engine animating all of this, keeping Anthony Perkins clipping in and out of view and running into walls. Obviously there's significant dramatic weight here but when you cook the arugula of importance down you're left with the same takeaway as when Larry Fine steps on a nail and crosses his eyes: "that would suck if it happened to me"

  Perkins is expertly cast in this. He's built like a deer and carries himself through the surreal and almost German Expressionist world of this film like the middle point in Buster Keaton's Animorphs transformation into a prey animal. But for anybody not…

• 

  Review by PTAbro ★★★★½ 3

  Absurd. Surreal. Oppressive. All fine words to describe Orson Welles' The Trial, but I think the term that best describes how I felt while watching is 'hysterical': not in the sense that The Trial is a comedy - to describe it as a black comedy stretches the very definition to the breaking point - but that I found myself laughing to ward off the physical and mental unease it forced upon me (especially during the absolutely insane last 20 minutes). That a film can cause laughter as a defense mechanism is a testament to Welles, Kafka, and Perkins.

  The dialogue flies by so fast that you become inured to the fact that the words spoken are so bizarre, the sentences…

• 

  Review by CJ Probst ★★★★½ 17

  Where to start? Leave it to me, when choosing a film from the great director, to choose one that probably least best represents him. Well, I sure wasn’t going to write any more additional, undeserved praise about that over-rated movie about a sled, so this is what you get!. Just kidding. Seriously though, The Trial is an adaptation of a Franz Kafka story so the challenging and somewhat inaccessible nature of his work will always take the driver’s seat in a project like this. Similarly, another favorite director of mine, Michael Haneke, made his attempt at adapting the Kafka book The Castle. Though both directors have distinct and recognizable styles, both of these films would be lost among their distinguished…

• 

  Review by Ethan ☀️ 1

  This isn’t even fiction the American legal system just be like that.

• 

  Review by phoebe 💫 ★★★½

  me, not understanding orson welles or philosophy: well it's certainly.............kafkaesque

• 

  Review by Catus ★★★★

  This film made me afraid of:

  • Books
  • Buildings
  • The color gray
  • Children
  • Old people
  • Hats
  • Paper
  • Hands
  • Trenchcoats
  • Orson Welles
  • Doors
  • Stairs
  • Lockers
  • Desks
  • PowerPoints
  • Beams
  • People with glasses
  • Jobs
  • Lamps

• 

  Review by nick ★★★½ 2

  The Trial is Orson Welles in his most stylishly adventurous mode, although the storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. As an adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial is rightfully bizarre, surreal, and rebellious, and features an outstanding performance from a mesmerizing Anthony Perkins.

  Focusing on a man's journey of seeking justice after being accused of an unspecified crime, this excels the most with its memorable visuals, which is claustrophobic to the bone. Welles' command of light and sound is top-notch, and this probably serves as an influence on the styles of Lynch and Ari Aster.

  Unfortunately, the story itself didn't grab me, and Welles' choice to focus on long dialogues, low sense of humor and stagey touches didn't help. I still appreciate it for its social relevance though.

• 

  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

  Orson Welles brings to the screen a terrific adaptation of The Trial, a nightmarish posthumously published Franz Kafka novel. The film features an eccentric cast that includes Anthony Perkins as the unfortunate Joseph K, a passive office worker arrested and standing trial on the strength of being accused of a never-explained crime. The story follows him as he tries to wend his way through the legal system, but finds himself distracted, diverted and continually kept in the dark about his case. 

  It's only the second film, along with Citizen Kane, that Welles could master from its conception to the final editing. Throughout, he demonstrates excellent fidelity to the original material's essence by distilling sexuality and irony in his film, two…

• 

  Review by Brendan Michaels ★★★★★

  Orson Welles really was the greatest filmmaker, huh?

• 

  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★½ 1

  The Trial is a gripping film of how bureaucratic systems can crush the individual. It is the story of one man within the societal machine. His trial takes place outside work hours, to ensure he can slave away at work and be crushed by the system in his free time also. This is a surreal and cryptic film, with conversations that all go nowhere and fruitless attempts by our protagonist to escape his fate. The odd cinematography and large sets create something perfectly confusing. However, even beyond Kafka's nonsensical narrative, this film is a indecipherable mess. As our lead is illogically led down a path towards death, the film makes little effort to present this confusion clearly. What is deliberately…

• 

  Review by Andrew Saladino ★★★★★

  A real wonder -- one of those experiences I have only a couple of times a year of being instantly grabbed from the first frame and held completely for the whole duration of a movie. Welles filters Kafka's absurdism through a slight German Expressionist lens, getting incredible mileage out of the Eastern Bloc brutalist architecture standing in for a wasteland of mindless mass order and structure - that army of worker bee drones clacking away at their desks and then rising together in unison at the end of the workday is like something out of a Jacques Tati movie; in fact, the dark comedy here would make it a great double-feaure with PLAYTIME, or even Gilliam's BRAZIL or Billy Wilder's…

• 

  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★

  Even the scratchy, boxed version on Kanopy (sourced, I think, from Milestone's now-obsolete 2000 restoration) reveals such astonishing depths of field and vivid, nightmarish composition that this immediately announces itself as one of Welles's finest works. The canted angles, wild focal points and perfect location scouting create a hell that combines the worst of modern socialist architecture and cavernous Old World glory to suggest a land completely outside of an ideology other than repression. (For a guy who loathed Antonioni so much, Welles sure does seem to be playing in the Italian's sandbox at times here, turning Antonioni's ambivalent search for the soul into a Freudian explosion of sexual maladjustment.) A fitting companion piece for F for Fake in that Welles foregrounds his great love of nonsense, here rendered as a political cri de coeur in relation to the other film's artistic manifesto.