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From:Julie Christie , Donald Sutherland , Hilary Mason , Clelia Matania , Massimo Serato , Paramount , Nicolas Roeg ,
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#3080 |
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 great ingredients but not quite emiril dish, 2008-11-16
DVD: Don't Look Now:
Assuming you want horror/suspense, you could not have finer
ingredients. Great actors, author(s), cinematography, Venice
scenes, psychic phenomena. But, (besides a little too
much butt) the continuity just was'nt there in our opinion.
Lovely boats tho.
Twoseniorcitizens
Still creepy after all these years, 2008-10-24
I saw this film when it first came out and found it...well, creepy. Now, having found it on the library shelf I thought I'd see how I'd like it. Actually I did find it more tolerable this time--less scary, but it was awfully long and I lost interest about two thirds of the way through. The cinematography is gorgous and there's a lot of beauty in the film, lots of shots of the splendid old churches. It just didn't work for me. It is supposed to be extremely mysterious, with all of the dark, decaying sumptuousness of old Venice, but there were too many night shots of the dark canals, rats, menacing people looking out of windows, etc. not to mention the poor blind psychic woman and her frumpy sister...It was just too much to take seriously and to keep the suspense up you have to take it somewhat seriously.
Julie Christie is quite beautiful in her prime and the sex scene is very nice. Personally I don't find Donald Sutherland very attractive, and the big 70's hairstyle and tight clothes of the era made him look really dorky. It might have worked better with a more appealing actor.
I do like some of Roeg's films a lot and I can appreciate his work here. If you have a high tolerance for this style you may like this; otherwise you may either have a laugh or be bored. Read all the reviews before you order it. (I'd like to change my rating to three stars.)
1 of 1 customers found the following review helpful:
 Death in Venice, 2008-06-25
Nicholas Roeg's 1973 DON'T LOOK NOW may be one of the single best studio films produced during the great so-called Hollywood Renaissance of 1969-1977; it certainly is one of the most influential. Using Daphne du Maurier's brilliantly ambiguous and mysterious novella as its base, Roeg uses her ghost story to produce what is really a meditation on time and space and the way in which fiction (and particularly film) structure our epistemological awareness of them both. The primary setting is Venice during the off-season, where a wealthy couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), are recuperating from the loss of their small daughter who drowned months before on their English estate. John is working restoring a damaged sixteenth-century venetian church, while Laura is distracted by a mysterious pair of English sisters, one of whom is psychic and insists their dead daughter is trying to contact them to warn them of impending danger.
There's much more besides, and Roeg complicates matters by splintering our awareness of both physical space (by complex camera work that emphasizes reflections and disjuncture) and of time (by crosscutting future events with events taking place in diegetic time). When all this comes together, especially when John conducts a cat-and-mouse game through the labyrinthine venetian streets and alleyways looking for both his wife and for a figure in a red mackintosh that may be his dead daughter, the emphasis on filmic technique begins to go beyond mere academic exercises and to increase your sense of suspense and horror. Certain sequences have become true classics, most particularly the famous sequence of Sutherland and Christie having sex in their Venetian hotel crosscut with scenes of them dressing afterwards; everything is beautifully fractured and splintered. As with De Palma's films from the same period, horror and the uncanny are used as vehicles through which the director can show us how film disrupts all our spatio-temporal coordinates. The acting at times might seem to contemporary viewers over-the-top (particularly in the opening sequence when Sutherland fails to save his daughter from drowning and carries her muddied body into the home), but it wouldn't work if it weren't pitched at this level. Neither Sutherland nor Christie have ever been better than they are here, and they share a terrific rapport.
Magnificent atmosphere, but the climax is a problem, 2008-06-19
Devastated by the death of their young daughter, an architect and his wife (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) spend some time in Venice, where the wife becomes convinced that a pair of sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania) has the psychic ability to contact the dead girl. The husband, however, tries to remain coolly rational about the situation, even as evidence mounts that he may have the gift himself. It all culminates in a startling conclusion.
I find I have to evaluate this film on two levels. First, there is no movie that projects an atmosphere of palpable dread and uneasiness more successfully. Every moment seems fraught with mystery and impending doom; we never feel safe in this picture. It is the payoff to the magnificent build-up where the film falls flat. The final revelation is a crushing disappointment, as it does not follow from anything that has gone before. The film is otherwise so masterful that I cannot bring myself to give it a poor review.
 Slow....., 2008-06-11
It's bad, when about halfway through the movie, I wanted it to end. I don't mind a slow movie if it leads up to something incredible. The ending was NOT scary, and it was so anti-climatic that I was expecting more. THIS IS IT????
Positives:
Some good suspense, which seemingly had nothing to do with the story..
Julie Christie naked
I'm not a fan of gore or anythign like that, I really do like a good suspenseful movie. This one just does not deliver.
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