Touches You

Simply A Masterpiece

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Upon finding a book that relates his grandfather's story, an officer ventures through Spain meeting a wide array of characters, most of whom have a story of their own to tell.The film was released in Poland uncut at 182 minutes, but it was shortened for release in the U.S. and UK at 147 minutes and 125 minutes, respectively. During the 1990s Jerry Garcia, together with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, financed a restoration and subtitling of an uncut print of the film. The restored film, re-released in 2001, is commercially available in VHS and DVD formats.The film is among 21 digitally restored classic Polish films chosen for Martin Scorsese Presents: Masterpieces of Polish Cinema.I don't even know that this needs a review. It is a great film, although a bit long for the casual viewer. When you have Scorsese and Coppola both endorsing a film, that is a great sign. Then throw in Luis Bunuel, and you know you have something special. But Jerry Garcia? I highly doubt any other film can claim such a diverse range of fans.

"The Saragossa Manuscript" is certainly an authentic masterpiece. Although its' duration is nearly 3 hours, the interest of the spectator does not fade in any part of the film. It is a fairy tale which contains several stories, something that could cause a confusion to the viewer. Here, we speak of something completely different. The narration flows so well that leads to the interference of the sub stories naturally, with no need of cheap tricks, which are very often used by many modern filmmakers at their vain attempts to imitate "Pulp Fiction". The artistic part is excellent and acting is brilliant from all the participants. Highly recommended!!! Νevertheless, its' fame is not so well spread as it deserves and possibilities of bumping into it is only at late night screenings of a national TV network or at a marginal cinema theater.

Beautifully executed frame tale in the tradition of Decameron and Canterbury tales. the network of stories presented during Napoleonic Wars weaves together the tales and adventures of a young officer Alfons van Worden in the king's Walloon guard on his way to Corduba during the end of the 18th century.This is one of my favorite movies and is a masterpiece of film narrative. the story meshes together the tales of a cast of colorful characters met by the protagonist Alfons van Worden. Top performances from some of Poland's renowned actors and some aspiring actors who owe the success of their later careers in no small part to their performances in this movie.

The comments on this film seem evenly distributed between favor and disfavor. At this date, I can't understand why anyone would not like it, but that's me. I first saw it in 1967, while I was in college. I loved it, and went so far as to locate and purchase the book(s) from which it was adapted. And that was before the internet, and Amazon, and Bookfinder. One of the books I didn't manage to get until I got to London. Reading it, I was amazed to realize that the film actually includes remnants of every story in the book(s): when, for example, Alphonso opens a door to find a bewigged scholar interrupted while declaiming "...Then the first skeleton tore out his own arm-bone and began hitting me with it..."-the whole story is there in the book, i.e., what the skeletons were doing there in the first place. The books, Manuscript Found At Saragossa and the New Decameron, are rightly considered Literary Treasures of Poland, along the lines of Notre-Dame á Paris in France, War and Peace in Russia, or Moby-Dick here. It's about stories and storytelling.By the end of the film, to say the least, the viewer has been presented with a convincing picture of sixteenth-century Europe from different angles, and it's safe to say that no other film, before or since, in color or Black-and-white, has done it better.