Invaderbank
The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
Dirtylogy
It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.
Murphy Howard
I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Teddie Blake
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
sobot
Before you sit to watch this movie, please make sure that you are enough open-minded to see a movie that is there not to entertain, but to express feelings, and that you have patience to see it through even if after first half of it you feel bored to death. Because, at one point, I felt that I was watching a movie with almost no plot, and with numerous repetitions of similar scenes that I could not comprehend.But then things began to unfold, I began to pick up symbols and feel emotions plugged into characters. There is no guarantee that all I understood was exactly what the director wanted me to, but I guess that is how art should be.Let me just mention some of my ideas that shouldn't spoil the movie for you. (1) The girls Photographer meets are all very beautiful, and also seem to form a sort of calendar. (2) Note that they ask for a phone exactly at the moment when he pours the last drop of wine into the glasses. I feel that this is the moment when purely physical relationship ceases to satisfy. (3) Translator and Driver entering the churches, and the Photographer staying outside, reflect perfectly different relations to life that they have, and the reason why the distance between them grows. (4) The sheep scene at the beginning seems endless and making no sense, but the same scene at the end hurts the most, because by that time you can also feel Driver's hand on yours.I watched many "art" movies that were praised by critics, and in which I felt there was nothing to feel or understand. This is not one of them, so please don't give it low votes just because you couldn't relate to it (or even worse, if you were not able to see it through)!
rgcustomer
It continues to amaze how gullible the viewers are with this film. When something is as bleak, tedious, pointless, and indecipherable as this, that does not signify that it is good. Rather, it signifies that it is bad. This is a basic point that I think many in the artistic community fail to perceive, intentionally, so to protect their own careers, which are often based on telling the public that there is more to film than meets the eye. Sorry, but there isn't, and that's the point.I didn't fall asleep during this one, but it was so boring that I found myself not even looking at the screen for minutes at a time, which is saying something since there isn't much else to look at. It didn't matter. Most of the time, the characters were speaking in a foreign language, with no subtitles. Their speech was unimportant. They never did anything particularly interesting, and the cinematography was horrible, so it wasn't even worth looking at. As a curiosity in an "anti-film" designed to antagonize the viewer, I suppose this succeeded, but as a film it is a failure. It has its good points (which is how it earned a 5 from me) but they aren't worth detailing since there are many here happy to sing the praises of this work.I've seen summaries of the film that indicate that women invited to eat at the photographer's place were in fact escorts. I saw or heard no evidence of that in the film. Maybe they revealed that in a language I do not speak. I have no intention of sitting through this again to find out what I missed.
m_ats
Questions of diasporic national identity are brilliantly addressed in the concept of a modern society, through various media, paralleled to more personal and private issues such as jealousy, stubbornness and personal pride. Only a person with very little life experience could not comprehend anything to what is going on in this movie. Atom Egoyan succeeded in making a very universal film that is touching at more than only one level. With this film, he proves that he is more than a good film director, but truly an artist who is able to transpose a world view through simple a medium, with low budget. This is personally my favorite Egoyan film, though it's by no means the longest or most commercially successful.
kaliama
This is a wonderful little film that I recently saw on a friend's recommendation, knowing virtually nothing about it except that I'd immensely enjoyed Atom Egoyan's "Exotica" and "the Sweet Hereafter". "Calendar" is not nearly as tragic as those two films; it concerns itself with the sadness of the disintegration of a relationship, but there is a subtle comedy to the film as well. The film is an experiment with a very specific, rigid, yet somehow apt structure: the film has twelve segments, one for each page of a beautiful calendar hanging by its photographer's phone. Laced into this structure is the story of the photographer and his wife's trip to Armenia, and the conflict that arises out of their different reactions to being in the land of their ancestry. It's all very well-told, and even though there is an element of inevitability, reinforced by the structure, the film never really strays into the realm of predictability. Finally, there are moments when the film seems to toy with breaking the sanctity of the fourth wall. This goes beyond the fact that the photographer and his wife are actually played by Mr. Egoyan and his wife. It's impossible to describe briefly and without spoiling the humor, though. If you're intrigued, check it out! You'll be glad.