‘Blindness’ – Mixed Reviews
”Blindness may well be the bleakest curtain raiser in the history of the festival, a nightmarish parable of the apocalypse, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and just as impressive in its way as his career-making City of God.”
“Blindness is a drum-tight drama, with superb, hallucinatory images of urban collapse. It has a real coil of horror at its centre, yet lightened with finely judged touches of gentleness and even humour. It reminded me of George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and Peter Shaffer’s absurdist stage-play Black Comedy, showing humanity groping in the darkness. This is bold and masterly filmmaking from Meirelles: popular entertainment with challenging ideas.” – The Guardian
“Blindness feels like a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction,” “It’d be easy to dismiss Blindness as Dawn of the Dead for NPR listeners or Outbreak for grad students…. But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus.” – Cinematical
Variety finds it “an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on José Saramago’s shattering novel. Despite a characteristically strong performance by Julianne Moore as a lone figure who retains her eyesight, bearing sad but heroic witness to the horrors around her, Fernando Meirelles’ slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago’s prose.”
