Protraph Lack of good storyline.

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

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.

KineticSeoul I will start out by saying that this movie started off disappointing because of the cinematography, it just seemed really outdated for the year 2000 when this movie came out. The trailer made this movie look pretty darn cool and has elements blended in for a great movie, but it just isn't all that effective with it's execution. It's just one of those movies that should have been a comic book instead of a movie. The movie is watchable without getting too dull, but the characters seem too much like cardboard cutouts sometimes. In fact I didn't find myself caring for any of the characters and didn't care what happens to them. It just didn't really have anything that grabbed my attention in the beginning of this film, it lacked the elements that would have made it entertaining or at least engaging. One of the main flaws of this film is that it's convoluted without grabbing the audiences attention and will not make you even care what is going on. This film however has it's moments although very few, but it does sort of picks up after a while although it takes patience to get there.4.5/10

Mattias Petersson I have a troubled relationship to Takashi Miikes films. While i usually find them interesting i have a hard time really enjoying them. And while (or perhaps because) this is one of his less extreme movies i have the same problem here.When Takashi Miike is discussed people often mention his over-the-top, gore-filled movies with flashy visuals and plots that are usually quite hard to comprehend. Of course plot usually takes the back-seat and are not the reason why you would watch something by Miike to begin with. "The City of Lost Souls" however is a more conventional movie where the plot is easier to understand and the action is not as extreme. And the result is, perhaps not surprisingly, not very interesting in my opinion.This is the story about a Brazilian gangster and his girlfriend who try to leave Japan to start a new life. But things don't go as planned and before long they end up having both the Triads and the Yakuza on their tail after interfering with a drug deal.This movie does have some interesting scenes, it's far from all bad. But in the end this is not twisted enough for my tastes. And to me it feels like Miike doesn't really have the ideas or the script to make a more straight-forward movie out of this. Rather it feels like he should either have focused more on the plot here or tried twisting the whole style of the movie a couple of times. In the end this becomes a movie with a weak plot and not enough screwed-up moments to make it interesting. While it's not without entertainment value, it's still a disappointment. I rate it 4/10.

jeanluc_rv What Takashi Miike is driven by is of course shock and irreverence. And He succeeded quite well here : lots of useless violence, lots of humor (the blood of the gunfighters drawing "love" on the ground), lots of bad taste. But "Audition" was characterized by the same ingredients. Not to be taken seriously of course. It's true that the codes of the genre are destroyed, played with : the hero is non-asian, the asians (all yakuza or triad members are worthless human beings driven by sadistic and violent impulses) And the end is a jewel in itself perverting the usual codes in the same way as the rest of the picture Great fun ! (another oddity : it must be the only Japanese picture in which half of the dialogue is in Portuguese...)

devil.plaything CITY OF LOST SOULS - Takashi Miike The film starts with Michelle Reis writing a letter telling her mother that she is in love with a Brazilian man who is "strong and kind". We then see the sleeping back of said Brazilian as CG butterflies flit across the screen. One settles on his shoulder and melts into the skin, becoming a tattoo that he will wear to the end of the film. Next we see Michelle on a bus with armed guards set to deport her from Japan. Her boyfriend steals a helicopter by force and stops the bus mith a machine gun, killing the guards in the process. He then whisks Michelle away to freedom.All of which sets the scene for what is to follow in this remarkable film. Strange and fascinating characters cross paths in a plot that is broadly irrelevant, except as a vehicle for bringing these characters together in a series of surreal events and encounters, not a few of which are also rather violent. Our 'cool Brazilian b****rd' hero and Michelle wish to marry and settle down abroad, but events and people would seem not to want them to. CITY OF LOST SOULS has a richly populated universe - a Japan where Japanese is barely the dominant language spoken, and characters of comic-book archetypes in appearance but anything but under the skin. The comic-book feel pervades much of the film, especially in the occasional CG enhanced shots that surely deserve an award for the best use of CG on screen - to push reality where it could never otherwise go. The script also has comic book touches, blending the dark and brutal with the strange and hilarious quite un-self-conciously. Miike shows here why his name is so revered - truly an artist pushing boundaries hard. I look forward to more of his films heading west (I'm determined to see DEAD OR ALIVE one day, circumstances having conspired to make me miss 3 festival showings so far!).