Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

HeadlinesExotic Boring

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

derrickneal-98015 This is an artsy horror film from France made in 1960. A surgeon and his apprentice abduct women off the streets and then perform a facial surgery to graft their skin on a woman they have kept imprisoned. Saying anything more would be doing disservice to the film but here is what I can say: This is a haunting film full of intense atmosphere right from the location and setting to the method by which most actors enact their characters. The music also adds to the surreal nature and if such films with surrealistic images and intense atmosphere (which take preceding over plot or character) than this should be a must watch on your list.

TheRedDeath30 Here I go. I am about to write one of those reviews that gets me endless "Not Helpful" votes because I am about to dare to trash a film that so many hold in such high regard. If there was a "Film Snob Scale" I think I would be about a 7. In my imaginary scale, a 10 is the total snob. This is the guy who talks to you about Jodorowsky and Malick and would never deign to watch something common. A 1 on this scale likes the Adam Sandler movies on Netflix. Why am I making up imaginary scales and rambling on in this review? It's to give you some sense of where I am coming from here. I am not one with common tastes. I enjoy film. I enjoy movies that make me think. With all of that said, I think only the 10s on my snob scale will truly like this film. I think it benefits from "foreign film disease" (yes, I'm making stuff up again). This is a syndrome where a movie that would be considered "good" in English is escalated to the status of greatness because it is in a foreign language. This idea that somehow foreign film makers, and especially French film makers, inherently make better films.To begin with, the plot of this movie has existed since the dawn of the Poverty Row b-horror film. Whether the villain is interested in obtaining "parts" for his own self, his lover, his family member or anyone else, horror history is littered with the discarded body parts of some mad scientists plan to make someone whole again. So, in the void of anything creative in the plot, one has to ask if the plot we are given is done with anything the audience hasn't seen before. Has the director given us something new and profound. My answer to that is resoundingly "no".The majority of this movie is so understated as to border on boring. Critics and film snobs alike will want to regale you with diatribes about how this director was seeking a new kind of horror, an intellectual horror, blah blah blah. There is no emotion on anyone's face (except the victims and half the time they can't be bothered). Nothing really happens ever in this movie. Half the run time is slow, lingering shots of some characters' face, endlessly hanging there as if this creates tension or atmosphere. There is nothing to entertain, at all. That is the crux of my problem with the film. I am all for art. I want creativity. I want thought. BUT I WANT ENTERTAINMENT. I have to end the movie thinking "yeah, that was good". If it is good and it, also, gives me something artistic, that's what creates a great movie. If it ends and I have to go looking for things to praise like cinematography, camera angles, or directive style. If I need to have completed a four year degree in film studies from UCLA to "appreciate" the movie, then it's not a good movie. It fails at its' primary purpose, which is to entertain.In the end this is all sound and fury signifying nothing. It's a film snob's dream and a movie that the average joe will fall asleep on within 30 minutes. Unless you would consider yourself a "10" on the film snob scale, skip it.

Leofwine_draca EYES WITHOUT A FACE is widely considered to be one of the landmarks of horror cinema, helping to usher in a new wave of grisly, physical horror movies in the 1960s. Seen today it's a good companion piece to LES DIABOLIQUES, going for a gutsy, visceral approach rather than a psychological thriller style, although it still has plenty of character depth. The simple storyline, about a deranged surgeon trying to graft a new face onto his disfigured daughter, has proved hugely influential even to this day.The film benefits from strong direction which delivers a chilly atmosphere to the proceedings. There's no faulting the acting either, but really it's the script that makes this work; the story plays out in a cold, dispassionate way that links nicely with the events on the screen. Even today, the surgical scenes are shockingly graphic and disturbing, and really pack a punch. The film is a slow burner that builds to a Grand Guignol-style climax that works a treat.

Steve Pulaski The opening of Eyes Without a Face (Les yeux sans visage) shows a young woman named Louise (Alida Valli), the assistant to the brilliant, renowned surgeon Dr. Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), dumping a body in the river, who Dr. Génessier later identifies as his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob). Christiane's face was horribly disfigured following a car accident, and following her funeral, we realize she is still living under the care of her father, with a plain, white mask over her face. Her father, who owns his own clinic right next door to their home, is trying to restore the beauty of Christiane's face by sending his assistant to find and befriend young, attractive women so that they can be kidnapped, taken to his clinic, and stripped of their own face to be surgically placed on Christiane's. One day, Louise finds Edna Grüber (Juliette Mayniel), an attractive, young Parisian woman who looks to be a perfect match for Christiane. Upon drugging her and taking her back to Génessier's home, the process of stripping Edna of her face and applying it to Christiane's begins in a horribly gruesome way.From that premise alone, many potential viewers of Eyes Without a Face will be turned off and never look in the film's direction again. What they'll fail to see, however, is how remarkably beautiful of a film this is. Despite its grotesque premise, director Georges Franju keeps the film on a quiet scale, conducting everything in a softly poetic manner, relying on the essences provided by Eugen Schüfftan's black and white cinematography to carry the film. This atmosphere makes the film a decidedly artful venture, showcasing the lavish scenery and costume designs of those involved rather than making the film entirely about shock and awe.Admittedly, there is gruesomeness to be found in Eyes Without a Face, and the level in which it's employed is pretty strong, especially given the time period in which it was made. Franju handles the gore in a way that makes the film more about the process than the actual shock; with such a frightening and depraved premise, one expects the film to be filled to the brim with completely nonsensical ugliness and gross-out schtick. Thankfully, the driving force behind the film knows how he wants everything to be executed, and that's not in the way of bargain basement shock. Franju creates an impact that's potentially everlasting on the viewer, creating a film that's equal parts carefully-executed French drama and classic American monster movie.I liken Franju's film to an American monster film not only because of its atmosphere, but its buildup and execution. At only ninety-minutes, Eyes Without a Face is conservative in its narrative pacing and relatively slowburn in its structure. Franju hooks us early on by painting the picture of a clearly intelligent and thoughtful doctor, but one who is also not mentally stable. We then see Franju change gears to give his daughter's perspective on her treatment, living a now secret life confined to a white mask and her father's clinic, struggling to keep her own mental stability. Then we cut to Louise's manipulative, thankless task, and so on; Franju structures the film in layers, giving us suspense before providing us with an execution similar to a monster movie. We get a lot of tension before the instance we've been waiting for finally occurs, and through that, the same kind of emotions and feelings arise.Eyes Without a Face comes at the pivotal time in French cinema when a new wave was underway. The longstanding "tradition of quality," where older directors made films for an older crowd, reiterating common values and traditionalist principles, was being demolished by younger, more radical directors who were motivated by watching a great deal of subversive films from all over the world and wanted to profile the kind of ideas they beared and they felt. These ideas were often politically-charged (a great deal of the 1960's work of Jean-Luc Godard), autobiographical works (several early works of François Truffaut), and films that simply broke every convention in French cinema at the time (specifically Godard's Breathless). Franju previously was a documentarian, making films concerning Paris industry, one about a slaughterhouse and another about the modernization of the city. Eyes Without a Face was his first film to deviate from his forte, and what amounted as a result was a great deal of critical indecisiveness about what kind of path Franju was attempting to forge with this new direction. Despite all of the criticism he received, Franju responded quaintly, saying the purpose was to give simple genre films like this some credibility, showing that they can break new ground and give us something to talk about just as much as any documentary could.Eyes Without a Face is a masterclass of suspense and terror, and remains a revolutionary work of not only French horror, but French cinema in general.Starring: Pierre Brasseur, Edith Scob, Alida Valli, and Juliette Mayniel. Directed by: Georges Franju.