El Topo (1970)
74 %
Reviews Counted: 31 Fresh: 23 Rotten:8 Average Rating: 6.7/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 5 mins
Synopsis:
With its combination of surreal imagery and assault on the ideals of the Western, EL TOPO may appear to be equal parts Luis Buñuel and Sam Peckinpah, but it's all Alejandro Jodorowsky. In addition to his directing duties, Jodorowsky contributes to the film's writing, music, editing, and... [More]
Genre: Westerns
Starring: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
While I truly do doubt that modern viewer will have much use for Jodorowsky's dated spiritual philosophy, the style with wich he expresses that philosophy is often quite exciting.
04/21/08 03:11 PM
A dated counterculture goulash long hyped as art by a blank generation desperate for something different.
07/14/07 03:29 AM
As perplexing as large parts of it are, the film certainly isn't boring. And it's kind of fun trying to figure out what it's all supposed to mean.
07/13/07 01:40 PM
a mystic trip through political, religious and philosophical terrains, gunning down all normative notions of what the western - or indeed Western civilisation - is supposed to be.
07/04/07 12:45 PM
For the adventurous viewer, El Topo is a bizarre, colorful, unforgettable experience.
06/14/07 11:02 PM
haunting and haunted, flitting at the edges of Jodorowsky's masculine fantasy
05/01/07 03:29 PM
Without the aid of mind-expanding narcotics though, El Topo can't help looking laughably ramshackle, the combination of bad dubbing, shoddy camerawork and over-the-top performances making it pretty much unwatchable by modern standards.
04/10/07 03:15 AM
One things for sure, they certainly don't make 'em like this any more. Nor, I suspect, would anyone want them to.
04/07/07 03:27 AM
Top Critic It's steeped in blood and sex and dream imagery and weird music and imparts a sense of heat and wonder and even revulsion in a way that always feels artful and exact.
03/16/07 02:38 PM
The movie’s lure is sensual and unflagging; that’s what makes it, for all its arty absurdity, the last great movie of the 1960s.
02/10/07 03:39 AM
This is gutbucket Luis Buñuel , surrealism on the cheap, and it hasn't dated well -- the blood is patently fake and the gunshots are dubbed.
01/26/07 03:46 PM
Top Critic You may find it a tiresome, macho relic -- or a ragtag circus wandering through a fantasy realm part Treasure of the Sierra Madre, part Tolkien's Middle-earth.
12/12/06 12:52 PM
Top Critic El Topo would be part of the revolutionary, post-'60s movement of Antonio das Mortes and The Last Movie if its private mythology didn't belong so obviously to its maker's acid subconscious.
12/11/06 09:26 AM
A mass of indecipherable symbols combined with obvious self-indulgence on the part of a writer-director-star Alexandro Jodorowsky make what could have been an entertaining western into one of the more pretentious films ever made.
08/29/06 05:46 PM
With style constantly contradicting content, and the prevailing mood redolent of egotism and misogyny, it leaves one the feeling of having waded through a full-blown fantasy where even the self-degradation emerges as just another form of narcissism.
01/26/06 03:15 AM
El Topo is a good deal more interesting and a good deal less hung up on its own pretensions than all my most intelligent friends had led me to believe.
05/09/05 03:15 AM
Top Critic Everything about this mystical trip smacks of narcissism, even the scenes where the filmmaker is lowering himself in acts of self-deprecation.
04/05/05 11:30 AM
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