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.
Comment
04/21/08
El Topo (1970)
74 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 31
Fresh: 23
Rotten:8
Average Rating: 6.7/10
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Reviews for El Topo
A dated counterculture goulash long hyped as art by a blank generation desperate for something different.
07/14/07
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
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
For the adventurous viewer, El Topo is a bizarre, colorful, unforgettable experience.
06/14/07
Violent, visionary, vital.
05/02/07
haunting and haunted, flitting at the edges of Jodorowsky's masculine fantasy
05/01/07
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
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
A dreary, protracted exercise in sadomasochism.
03/16/07
Top CriticIt'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
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
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
Top CriticYou 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
Top CriticEl 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
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
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
No review available.
06/17/05
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
Top CriticEverything about this mystical trip smacks of narcissism, even the scenes where the filmmaker is lowering himself in acts of self-deprecation.
04/05/05
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