Greenes Please don't spend money on this.

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

dragokin Aleksandr Sokurov's take at Faust is a courageous act. Yet, my issues with this movie have nothing to do with the discussion whether a Russian director might understand the essence of Goethe's work. This is a futile debate, because Sokurov comes closer to Goethe than an average Westerner to Russian classics, as displayed in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina (2011).In Faust, Sokurov did what he's done before. There are rather realistic, almost documentary images and there are dream-like sequences. We've seen the former in, for example, the trilogy of Moloch (1999), Taurus (2001) and The Sun (2005). And we've seen the latter in, for example, Russian Ark (2002) and Alexandra (2007). So what went wrong?Again, i'm expressing my views here and won't try to judge Sokurov's talents and abilities. In Faust we kick off with the daily work of Dr. Faust and progress toward the space beyond reality. Whether it is a higher plane of existence or main character's hallucination is left unclear, yet it portrays well his inner state, triggered by malnutrition and selling the soul. Personally, at a certain point i found this movie difficult to watch...

petra_ste At the very beginning of Faust, the camera plunges from the sky, descending to a small house in a rural town, and ends up zooming on the penis of a corpse dissected in an autopsy. In his retelling of one of the most famous tales of western literature, director Sokurov plays with symbols, juxtaposing spiritual and worldly, sacred and profane, water (associated with Margarete) and earth, sterility and fertility.See also how the film plays with space: indoor locations are overcrowded and claustrophobic, the town a labyrinth of mud and bricks, the uncanny forest surrounding it resembles Doré's illustrations for Dante's Comedy. Only when Margarete appears - and at the very end - sets become less oppressive. The result is an insidious, subtly disquieting movie.The occasional heavy-handed, distracting symbolism (the egg, the homunculus...) is redeemed by magnificent performances by the three leads. As Faust, Johannes Zeiler is exceptional in his vivid humanity, torn between sensuality and spirituality; as the object of his passion, lovely Isolda Dychauk gives a star-making turn. Anton Adasinsky as the "Moneylender" (the name Mephistopheles is never mentioned) is unctuous, porcine, whiny and malevolent, in a performance which defies all expectations for this kind of character and is all the more unsettling for that.8/10

gsf368 I'm learning German, and that's why I went to see this Russian film. I read in Wikipedia about the story, which I found quite interesting. I'm a regular movie goer, I love all kinds of movies, and I don't believe in movies for selected audiences... I just hate bad movies that come along and try to make you feel like you didn't understand them. This is the worst movie ever, and not the worst movie in its kind, it's like you take all the movies ever made in the history of mankind, well: this is the worst, you can't make a worst movie than this one. It doesn't even fit the screen, it's most of the time out of focus, the script are random words without a meaning, the characters are just there without any reason whatsoever. I really believe the man who made this film should quit, the ones who participated in it, quit along with him. This man should start working in other areas may be cleaning cars or something like this. I hated every minute of this, and the six other people there hated it too. It makes you wanna stab your throat with the straw of your drink, it makes you hate the capability of seeing, it makes you wanna pay your ticket again so they stop the show. This one deserves a vote of -5. Really. Don't do it.

altyn Sokurov is in a very different line of business from Goethe. No ennobling Faust's motives here, no redemption thanks to beauty or God's grace. The spectator is cast down onto a greasy, grimy and smelly small-town world where a cynical Dr. Faust states at once that he has not found any soul when dissecting people's bodies. Material problems suffocate his thirst for knowledge, so the tempting devil is the town's moneylender (a character who does not believe in eternal good but believes in eternal evil). Faust lets himself be seduced with only formal protest and does not care a jot about signing his soul away, when the deal is at last offered; but, as he keeps saying, "for this, you must give me more". Margarethe is not enough, meeting the dead is not enough, understanding nature's work is not enough; Faust goes on, apparently to nowhere. It is a visually straining experience, but also enticing in retrospect.