BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Connianatu How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

gavin6942 A melancholy poet reflects on three women he loved and lost in the past: a mechanical performing doll, a Venetian courtesan, and the consumptive daughter of a celebrated composer.Although I am not an opera fan by any stretch of the imagination, I have to admire this film. The vibrant colors in a time before color was common, the makeup, costumes, camera angles and tricks to create a world of dreams. One would think this would be near the top of many classic lists, but it does not seem to be... in fact, it was not even one of the first Michael Powell films I saw. Not even close.What surprised me the most was actually not the film itself, but the fact George A. Romero praises it on the Criterion disc. That is quite a strange thing. Not that Romero is a fan of the film -- that makes some deal of sense. But the fact Criterion thought to track him down for the release? How did that come about?

hasosch If someone wants to make a movie about "The Tales of Hoffmann", he has first to decide if the still middle-aged German cities with their dark, fantasy and horror provoking angles and creepy edges and slanting houses which Hoffmann chose for his tales, are giving the background of his film or the decadent Paris at the end of the 19th century, the city of the lights over the new avenues built by Haussmann which Offenbach chose. It is an open secret: Hoffmann does not fit into Offenbach's Paris as little as it is Hoffmann's tales that we believe to meet in Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann". However, the public around the world has accepted meanwhile that it was Offenbach's merit to have given Hoffmann's work a bombastic rebirth by leading him in his opera not form the darkness, but from the brightly sparkling light into the night. But now look, what Powell and Pressburger did: The landscape is neither Bamberg nor Montmartre, it looks like a late art-deco out of an advertisement catalog from Technicolor in which it was actually filmed. I honestly prefer the black and white silent "Hoffmann's Erzählungen" (1923), directed by Max Neufeld.Robert Rounseville does a great singing job as Hoffmann, chapeau! But --- he IS not Hoffmann! And the same, unfortunately, is true for the rest of the cast. E.T.A. Hoffmann as a true multi-talent was also a painter, and we know how Olimpia, Dapertutto, Klein Zaches, Lindhorst etc. looked! I would say, Moira Shearer does a good job as Olimpia, but when you see Ludmilla Tchérina as Giulietta, you can feel that cold water running down your neck. When the famous scene comes, where Giulietta steals Erasmus' reflection, I was sitting like glued before the TV --- and nothing happened. What are the "Tales of Hoffmann"? Simply one of dozen-wise fabricated products out of the plant of Powell and Pressburger that simply did not have to lack in the series? Not a ghost of feeling for this and so many other crucial passages. And I really doubt that here and elsewhere the details were sacrificed for the sake of the big effect: No, the directors simply did not have the feeling and the knowledge for the Hoffmann-Offenbach theme.

BergBROG I actually love "Tales" more for its music than this visual version, which is, still, stunning and most effective . . . altho it is more ballet than anything else."Actually, there have been suggestions that the "Antonia" episode be moved from last to first episode sequentially in the opera..."One of the endless "discussions' musical historians have . . . it appears that that was the way Offenback originally intended it to be, altho he revised the work so many times, who knows? The Antonia segment works much better as opera, with the devastatingly beautiful finale . . . " If I am correct, the "Antonia" episode was completed by another composer..."Not true . . . " ... Offenbach having died before completing Tales of Hoffmann."Not really true . . . he just never considered it finished, the way many composers and authors view their works. " Ahhh...that hauntingly beautiful "Barcarolle"....nothing can compare to it!! "Yes there can , , , the Barcarolle was lifted, musically intact, from a much earlier (and less successful) Offenbach work . . . Doesn't render it any less beautiful.A great, great opera . . . and a fun way to introduce novices to the art.RHB

tedg This is not your usual movie experience. It matters, so prepare your day accordingly.Its not as miraculous as "Red Shoes." But it is bigger. It is folded like Shoes, but less delicately. In the case of the previous project, the story was about a performer, who glided in and out of the movie and the movie within, the two overlapping magically.Here we have the same dancer, the marvelous, redheaded Moira Shearer. And her dance merges with the movie, but the movie is a heavier construction:It is a movie of an opera of a ballet performance wherein we embed three stories. The stories themselves fold into each other, each a story of Hoffman in love with a woman manipulated by an evil man-spirit. He's the same man in each case, of course. In each of the four cases (the three stories and the outside of the ballet), he prevents the lovers from uniting.These guys Powell and Pressburger, don't know much about the immediacy of storytelling. They don't know long form pacing. They don't know deep emotional engagement. But they sure know how to stage some of the most marvelous effects and build to them. They know something about photographing dance and what balance means to a camera. And they are perhaps the masters at cinematic folding: the ways of visually ambiguating the play and the audience.I may put this on my list of films you must see before you die. We'll see how I feel about it in a month, if I still am affected in my dreams.One thing that enhances this: Hoffmann is in love with Moira's Ballet character, someone he says embodies all three of his previous, lost loves, the first of which is also Moira. She's redhead. The director's love is also a redhead, one Pamela Brown who plays Hoffmann's (male) attendant. He remained devoted to her for the 25 years until her death. His attentiveness to her, hers to Hoffmann, and Hoffmann's to Moira's character is a sort of circle. Its ironic then that Moira's participation in Powell's two ballet movies ruined her career.I saw this together with "Nightdreams," a porn film from the early eighties. It was episodic like this, worked with women stereotypes like this in a context of extreme fantasy and demons, and helplessness. Same sort of notion: story, tension, attraction, obsession. A different class in terms of skill of course and cinematic breadth, and the story here is more genteel in term of genitals. But a disquieting similarity.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.