Manthast Absolutely amazing

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

digimatic First I want to address some of the inane reviews here that are moaning about the lack of narrative, or more inane still, the lack of "plot"?? What can I say to that? You know SFA about cinema (as an art form) by the sounds of it and would probably be better off sticking to Hollywood fare. If you have a social conscience and know something about the underbelly of capitalism you will 'get' this movie - though a sense of humour helps (something it seems some of these reviewers do not have). From a technical point of view I was most impressed by the use of sound in this work and would recommend it to any music and image student looking for a good example of creative sound usage in film making. Put simply, I liked this film, I found it touching, I was moved, what more can I say?

alison-jasonides Firstly, this film was a gorgeous object. The way shots were set up and filmed deserve praise. Perhaps its nothing new to explore the grotesqueness of the babushka's wrinkled, hollow faces, or the eating etiquette (or lack there of) of peasants in close quarters on a train. I kept thinking someone must have just been watching a Fellini movie marathon-- or even some Sergio Leone spaghetti western before filming these scenes. However, behind every image that seemed repulsive or bleak or even hackneyed, I could not stop watching or being in awe that I was seeing such beauty. The sound-- not just the music and the singing and wailing of the characters, but the sound scape of each scene-- trains, drills, boots marching in thick mud, insect chirps-- had me watching the movie with the volume way up. The story was initially engaging, and as many of the reviewers here state, it seemed to unravel from a tightly set-up premise into some sort of meditation-- which was fine with me. Granted, I was confused at times, wondering where Marina was going after watching her trudge through the decaying Russian countryside for fifteen on-screen minutes, or what revelation would come out of Zoya's wake scene or the drunken feast scene. It was challenging to watch it all in one sitting, solely, i think, because most movies have trained us--definitely me- to look for action-reaction, immediate gratification in their storytelling. I had to view this two hour movie in three increments. It was well worth it. I'm not sure what everything means: is Marina one of the four "Doubles", one of the diseased ones that her drinking partner in the bar described? What is the significance of the dogs verses the machines? What changes so that Marat begins selling ground beef (thats incidentally nine years old)? I don't know, and really, does it matter? I kept thinking of "Amores Perros" as I watched "4": the dog motif, the intertwined stories, the life-altering connections to strangers, the revelatory windows on a culture which both these movies are. But "4" seems rougher, less slick and more of a feat to have completed. The voyeur in me was very excited to see two versions of the female body. The sisters naked in the sauna contrasted so deeply with the old crones' drunken striptease and breast-play, not only for the obvious reason that younger breasts and flesh are more aesthetically pleasing than the expired, sagging skin of aged peasant ladies without moisturizer, but also because, even with their taut beauty, the younger women seem to find no pleasure whatsoever in their bodies-- one selling hers even-- while at least the babushkas find humor and even delight in what is under all those layers of raggedy clothes. Bravo to the women who agreed to film those scenes!

nycritic I'm starting to think that there's a conspiracy, all right: one that involves a wallop of money paid to those who have access to published columns in newspapers and film and art magazines to ensure that this or that film, despite its obscurity, will reach a higher status via a ratings point which will tag it with a "universal acclaim" or something within that range, thus ensuring unsuspecting folk (like me) will wander into theatres or rent the bloody thing, expecting a surprise, only to find myself racing to the bathroom to upchuck.This movie is one of them. It has definitely make me bypass any and every posted article I come across because it's rather clear that two things might have happened: either I didn't get the message that is so hidden beneath this film's inner realms as to be impossible to access, or they and I watched two entirely different movies that happen to share the same name. 4 is a dirty trick on the audience. It's no wonder that it appeared and disappeared faster than you can say "smorsgabord" and that despite the rating it got on Metacritic, no one had heard of it. It's terrible with sugar on top.Firstly, there is the ever-present number four from start to finish. While having a little symbolism here and there is okay, and it's been done with various degrees of success in many well-known movies, this movie is panting with it. Four dogs at the start of the movie, looking at the camera in a heretofore empty street when suddenly, machinery drops onto the foreground and proceeds to rip open the asphalt. Four people in a bar, although one of them is a non-entity. Three of them go their separate ways but are linked nevertheless, not only to each other but to what their lives are not. While this concept may work, the movie meanders so much -- particularly with the story of the would-be model played by Marina Vovchenko which goes into the territory of the extremely bizarre, and not in a good way -- that the initial theme gets lost in translation. Or maybe, like I said before, I just "didn't get it." The problem also lies in that so much time is spent on Marina's story (which revolves on the death of her sister, from bread-chewing, no less, and the subsequent, shrill mourning which follows) that any interest in the inherent Surrealism dissipates without a trace. So what if the same horrifying tales that the three strangers interchanged in a bar seem to have a truth of their own? The director doesn't invest much time in truly tying them together, or weaving a tighter story that could, in a David Lynchian way, intersect either with the past-present, or within alternate dimensions, or even as a straightforward, mundane science-fiction story. This is an uphill battle against an insurmountable wall that only a saint (or someone into the weird for weird's sake) could endure.

zetes Visually stunning, but that's pretty much all it has going for it. This Russian did hold my interest for about an hour. I'd definitely never seen anything like it. But at about that point I realized it wasn't going to go anywhere. It's perfectly satisfied with being weird for weirdness' sake. There is no coherent narrative. I probably would have enjoyed it anyway, seeing as the visuals are quite fun. However, there are many sequences that are loud and obnoxious, and it just started driving me crazy. After I watched it, I felt like I wanted to punch the first elderly woman whom I ran into. No film should make someone feel that way.