Alice
Reviews
Filipe Manuel Neto
**A film with qualities, but it is almost unbearable to watch due to a slow pace that tires the public.** There are a lot of films about missing people, and even though the theme is not so common in Portuguese cinema, it is necessary to consider that the Portuguese will be able to effortlessly name two or three foreign films on the subject. How to do it differently? It's difficult: either you invent something very “outside the box”, or you make a film about a real and concrete case, with a minimum of rigor and respect for the events. Marco Martins went a third way: his film takes inspiration from real cases that are somewhat popular in the media, but it does not report any true situation and tries to appear original. First of all, we must congratulate those involved. I'm somewhat hard on Portuguese cinema, but I'm fully aware that, in our country, making cinema is almost an act of intellectual rebellion. And with “Alice”, Marco Martins made a good entry into the seventh art and won great praise at some international film festivals. The strength and value of this film were solidly based on four qualities that are fair to praise: a good script premise, excellent cinematography, a good main actor and a quality original soundtrack. These are solid values and must be mentioned in any review or critical text about the film, but frankly, it seems not enough to qualify it as a good film. The Portuguese are good artists, they have a less detailed and poetic spirit, but they are terrible storytellers and this perhaps has a certain responsibility in the way in which, in cinema, there is a predominance of technical art and photography over the story told. It's something I will never accept because I see cinema in a diametrically opposite way, as a way of telling a good story. Nuno Lopes courageously assures the main character. The actor is famous among the Portuguese thanks to an enviable career on television, but he also had a good career in theater and cinema, and is an excellent professional. He perfectly embodies the anguish of a father who desperately searches for his daughter, and who clings to his last hopes. Unfortunately, he is alone in the film: Beatriz Batarda has almost no material and time to show us his worth, and the rest of the cast has characters so weak and uninteresting that they don't even deserve to appear in the film. The plot is based on excellent premises: Alice's disappearance and her father's search for any clue that leads to her whereabouts. Unfortunately, Marco Martins is good at directing, but not at writing a script, and he forgot that a good idea is not enough: you need to develop it, and this idea needs an effective, convincing development and a happy conclusion. . The film is full of loose ends and problems. For example, where are the Police? And no one informed that father that taking video images without permission in a public place is a crime? Why doesn't the film explore more of the relationship between the father and the girl's mother? And why redo, every day, the routine of the day she disappeared if it is already predicted that this will not help in finding her? Technically, the film relies on a hazy photograph that expresses the psychological interior of that father. Lisbon's urban landscape could not seem more hostile, more devoid of life and color (and Lisbon is an airy and bright city). I really liked that, and also the piano melody by Bernardo Sassetti, which makes everything even more sad and melancholic. However, it is exhausting to endure the almost pedestrian pace that the film takes on and which, combined with the cinematography and the piano, turns this film into a wake or an attempt to cure insomnia.
Movie Recommendation
Tabu2012-04-05Lisbon, Portugal, 2010. Pilar, a pious woman devoted to social causes, maintains a peculiar relationship with her neighbor Aurora, a temperamental old woman obsessed with gambling who lives tormented by a mysterious past.More...
Shimoni2025-01-22A teacher newly released from prison renegotiates the confines of the physical world while forced to face his nightmare in the flesh.More...
Velvet Buzzsaw2019-02-01Big money artists and mega-collectors pay a high price when art collides with commerce. After a series of paintings by an unknown artist are discovered, a supernatural force enacts revenge on those who have allowed their greed to get in the way of art.More...
Miss Sloane2016-11-25An ambitious lobbyist faces off against the powerful gun lobby in an attempt to pass gun control legislation.More...
Crank2006-08-31Chev Chelios, a hit man wanting to go straight, lets his latest target slip away. Then he awakes the next morning to a phone call that informs him he has been poisoned and has only an hour to live unless he keeps adrenaline coursing through his body while he searches for an antidote.More...
Chinatown1974-06-20Private eye Jake Gittes lives off of the murky moral climate of sunbaked, pre-World War II Southern California. Hired by a beautiful socialite to investigate her husband's extra-marital affair, Gittes is swept into a maelstrom of double dealings and deadly deceits, uncovering a web of personal and political scandals that come crashing together.More...
Blade Runner1982-06-25In the smog-choked dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, blade runner Rick Deckard is called out of retirement to terminate a quartet of replicants who have escaped to Earth seeking their creator for a way to extend their short life spans.More...
Oppenheimer2023-07-19The story of J. Robert Oppenheimer's role in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II.More...
Joker2019-10-01During the 1980s, a failed stand-up comedian is driven insane and turns to a life of crime and chaos in Gotham City while becoming an infamous psychopathic crime figure.More...
Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood2019-07-24Los Angeles, 1969. TV star Rick Dalton, a struggling actor specializing in westerns, and stuntman Cliff Booth, his best friend, try to survive in a constantly changing movie industry. Dalton is the neighbor of the young and promising actress and model Sharon Tate, who has just married the prestigious Polish director Roman Polanski…More...
Titanic1997-11-18101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater tells the story of her life aboard the Titanic, 84 years later. A young Rose boards the ship with her mother and fiancé. Meanwhile, Jack Dawson and Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets aboard the ship. Rose tells the whole story from Titanic's departure through to its death—on its first and last voyage—on April 15, 1912.More...
Shutter Island2010-02-14World War II soldier-turned-U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels investigates the disappearance of a patient from a hospital for the criminally insane, but his efforts are compromised by troubling visions and a mysterious doctor.More...
PK2014-12-18A stranger in the city asks questions no one has asked before. Known only by his initials, the man's innocent questions and childlike curiosity take him on a journey of love, laughter and letting go.More...
Green Book2018-11-16Tony Lip, a bouncer in 1962, is hired to drive pianist Don Shirley on a tour through the Deep South in the days when African Americans, forced to find alternate accommodations and services due to segregation laws below the Mason-Dixon Line, relied on a guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book.More...
Ex Machina2015-01-21Caleb, a coder at the world's largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world's first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.More...
Zack Snyder's Justice League2021-03-18Determined to ensure Superman's ultimate sacrifice was not in vain, Bruce Wayne aligns forces with Diana Prince with plans to recruit a team of metahumans to protect the world from an approaching threat of catastrophic proportions.More...
Back to the Future1985-07-03Eighties teenager Marty McFly is accidentally sent back in time to 1955, inadvertently disrupting his parents' first meeting and attracting his mother's romantic interest. Marty must repair the damage to history by rekindling his parents' romance and - with the help of his eccentric inventor friend Doc Brown - return to 1985.More...
Parasite2019-05-30All unemployed, Ki-taek's family takes peculiar interest in the wealthy and glamorous Parks for their livelihood until they get entangled in an unexpected incident.More...
The Shawshank Redemption1994-09-23Imprisoned in the 1940s for the double murder of his wife and her lover, upstanding banker Andy Dufresne begins a new life at the Shawshank prison, where he puts his accounting skills to work for an amoral warden. During his long stretch in prison, Dufresne comes to be admired by the other inmates -- including an older prisoner named Red -- for his integrity and unquenchable sense of hope.More...
Midsommar2019-07-03Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.More...