Werckmeister Harmonies (2001)
96 %
Reviews Counted: 26 Fresh: 25 Rotten:1 Average Rating: 8.4/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 25 mins
Theatrical Release: Oct 10, 2001 Limited
Synopsis: In a nameless, frozen, Eastern European village cloaked in fog, Janos (Lars Rudolph) choreographs three grizzly drunks in a pantomime of the earth circling the sun and the moon circling the earth. He freezes his actors and describes a total eclipse of the sun; the world grinds to a halt in... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla
Director: Bela Tarr
Screenwriter: Bela Tarr, László Krasznahorkai
Producer: Franz Goess, Miklós Szita
Composer: Vig Mihaly
Screenwriter: Bela Tarr, László Krasznahorkai
Producer: Franz Goess, Miklós Szita
Composer: Vig Mihaly
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Reviews
Six years after the 7-1/2-hour Satan's Tango, Magyar maverick Bela Tarr makes a stunning feature return with "Werckmeister Harmonies," another hypnotic meditation on popular demagogy and mental manipulation that's a snap at 145 minutes.
Comment
10/05/07
Top Critic
Bela Tarr's style seems to be an attempt to regard his characters with great intensity and respect, to observe them without jostling them, to follow unobtrusively as they move through their worlds, which look so ordinary and are so awesome, like ours.
09/14/07
Top Critic
A chilling, mesmerizing, intense account of ethnic cleansing (in spirit if not in letter) from Hungarian master Bela Tarr.
09/14/07
Top Critic
It's shot in static or very slow-moving long-takes; the monochrome images are deliberately oppressive; the pace would strike the organisers of a state funeral as excessively slow.
09/14/07
Limited appeal, a slow pace, a demanding film; but as interesting a work of art as the best of films
04/14/06
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03/28/06
dares to say the apocalypse has a startling, bleak beauty all its own.
03/14/06
It is an arduous task, but the film achieves a transcendent and ethereal beauty that only the few truly great masterpieces attain.
04/23/05
This will be a tough watch for many: an uncompromisingly difficult and severe experience. But I found it unique, mesmeric and sublime.
04/20/03
Tarr's true achievement is to attain the condition of silence, and of bottomless, awesomely inscrutable nightmare.
04/01/03
Perhaps Tarr's greatest gift is his merciless sense of cinematic economy and an ambiguity that springs not from some intellectual conceit but from the sheer honesty of his gaze.
01/19/03
A more accessible, less successful, if less rambling, work than Tarr’s Satantango.
03/05/02
I haven't seen any other Tarr films ... but Werckmeister Harmonies alone convinces me that he's one of today's great film artists.
02/03/02
Using long takes, sensuous camera movements and the mournful beauty of Mihaly Vig's score, Tarr offers in Werckmeister Harmonies an indelible statement on loneliness and spiritual thirst.
02/01/02
Top Critic
It should be clear to any one who watches [Bela Tarr's] films that the artistry itself is what connotes hope.
12/28/01
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