Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

luckyfox56 Sion Sono, the director of Suicide Club, returns with a beautifully complicated and deep film that deals with taboos such as pedophilia, abuse, suicide, and voyeurism-- and what a perfect director to make such a film. Sono goes about addressing these subjects in such a uniquely crazy yet mature way. He doesn't make fun of pedophilia, he blows it out of proportion to show how monstrous and damaging it is. This film studies the essence of life itself, and what reality truly is in a world without mercy. Much of its imagery is striking and will stick with me for a while. It is absolutely riveting and fascinating and I highly recommend it if you can stomach its content. Though it is not as profound as Suicide Club or Tag, it is certainly worth a watch.

chaos-rampant What a strange movie. It reminds me of Chan-wook Park in the way that it teeters so close to the edges of bad taste, or the trite movie conventions of melodrama, in an effort to ultimately transform them into grand gestures. So that the lowly and visceral can be ennobled, humanized into something akin to an opera.The first half hour of this is superb stuff, or really close to it. The violated mind as a vaudeville stage, to which we are literally invited by the impresario holding out a hand at a first-person camera; once inside, the reality of vicious trauma involving pedophilia, incest, and a cello case, this perversity that we usually find in Miike reflected, thus reversed (a mirror is crucial in this segment, and eventually fractured), into a nightmare world of the mind rendered with images of Cronenberg and rooms painted bloodred. This part is great because it understands the stuff of nightmares, and how the mind is a funhouse mirror that distorts the violence heaped upon it.Then the movie becomes something like an inverse Audition, about an unstable woman with a cello case full of dark secrets weaving her web and about another web being woven by her prey meant to ensnare her. She is an author writing a novel about the childhood stuff we just witnessed in the first part. The most interesting notion here is that her victim sets out to find out about her and why she writes herself in her books, what kind of self hides behind the facade.All this is marred by a pretty juvenile finale, where we are tossed about through a bunch of shocking revelations from one reality to the other, in an effort to know what 'actually' happened. Here lies the problem for me; we are told too much, too much of what was earlier a suggestion is attempted to be explained away (we even experience an earlier scene in the way that it actually happened, this tacky Fight Club device) and too much of this hinges on some unexpected twist than something that crawls underneath.Interesting movie and I will keep from it the amazing shots of the damaged mind envisioned as a neon-lit luna park, but it only reminds me again of how important it is that we have David Lynch.Having achieved the fame and exposure that he has, surprising in itself, it is perhaps easy to leave him behind in lieu of more obscure, undiscovered works such as this. But none of these can sustain and sublimate like he knows the dreamy illusion within movie structures that remain vague, mere outlines that hint at spiritual perils. He knows the stuff of nightmares but more importantly what mechanisms control them in the mind, how illusions are formed. This one has some intuitive grasp, but grasps blindly.

Scarecrow-88 Strange indeed. Shion Sono's bizarre STRANGE CIRCUS focuses on whether or not the repulsive subject matter of a woman's novel is in fact an autobiograph of her past or mere fantasy warping her sense of reality..seeping into everyday life she begins having a hard time dictating fiction from reality. Masumi Miyazaki is Sono's figurepoint. Rie Kuwana is a twelve year old girl sexually molested by her monstrous school principal father, often forced into a cello case with a peep hole so she must watch her parents making passionate love. Even though Kuwana(as Mitsuko) and her father are found by mother Sayuri(Miyazaki), nothing derives from it! Sayuri doesn't even respond after finding her husband and daughter in bed together! Instead, Sayuri begins to compete with her daughter for the father's love! Sayuri begins beating Mitsuko when papa is away. When Mitsuko defends herself over a missing earing, the result Sayuri falling down a flight of steps, the movie eventually shifts to novelist Taeko(also Miyazaki)and her assistant Yûji(Issei Ishida), who tends to her every need and whim. Yûji is aloof and practically zombie-like in his devotion to Taeko and ability to withstand insults in regards to his lack of a libido. Yûji may very well be hiding a secret, revealed without our knowledge to a group of body modification addicts. While directed with assured and mad skill by the director, I have to admit that I hated every minute of this movie because of its sickening subject matter. I could barely keep watching as the opening of the film completely places us into the story of a little girl and her abuse at the hands of a beastly father. And this bastard's sexual activities in front of her, not to mention, the mother who doesn't get her daughter out of this environment when the goings good. Thank goodness the director doesn't show explicit activity between father and daughter, opting to use a creative psychological method(the daughter narratively comments that she and her mother are the same, one, and so actress Miyazaki instead takes her place as the woman made love to)to get out of it. There's still plenty of sex, startlingly soft-core, but the little girl's abuse is implied which is a relief. That said, the director accomplished what he set out to obviously do, hit the viewer between the eyes and never let go. Whether or not you have a tolerance for the material and its characters will determine if you like STRANGE CIRCUS or not. Sono successfully carries us right into novelist Taeko's madness right until the very end. I can't deny this movie's power, but I don't have to like what I see, either.

yozkan002 This movie is about a young girl who is the victim of (violent and gory) parental abuse. Later the story focuses on the female writer of the girl's stories who may or may not have been involved with them personally.Incoherent and haphazard scenes have been thrown in to suggest flashbacks between reality and fantasy. Plenty of blood and blood-stained interiors have been used to heighten the drama without achieving this aim and becoming comical. Weak acting, weak scenario, emphasis on unnecessary gory scenes unrelated to the plot. Cannot recommend this film.