Goya's Ghosts.

"The official portraitist of Amadeus and The People vs Larry Flynt will return to theaters Friday with Goya's Ghosts, a costume drama and controlled historical epic that marks his first film since the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon in 1999," writes Paul Cullum. Profiling Milos Forman for the Los Angeles Times, he finds in the new film "a startling allegory for modern geopolitical adventurism - a subject the 75-year-old director has had much time to reflect on as of late."

But for Nick Schager, writing at Slant, Foreman "goes astray with Goya's Ghosts, a beautiful disaster of a period picture that weaves its preposterous story around Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) during the Spanish Inquisition and Napoleon's invasion of Spain."

Updated through 7/20.

The Reeler meets the director and notes that "Goya's Ghosts stands apart [from Forman's other films] in that Forman primarily exaggerates the world the artist lives in, not the artist's personal life."

Forman's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Updates, 7/17: Dan Persons talks with Javier Bardem, who sees his character, Brother Lorenzo, as "a victim of the totalitarian regimes that happened in that moment in history."

"It's certainly refreshing to see Forman, who wrote the film with legendary screenwriter and Buñuel partner-in-crime Jean-Claude Carrière, forgo his usual tendency of beating viewers over the head in order to convince them of the immaculate saintliness of his outsider heroes," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "Unfortunately, things start getting a little silly and, in typical Forman fashion, more than a little overwrought when Goya's Ghosts arrives at the Napoleonic War."

Updates, 7/18: "A prestigious, handsomely mounted costume piece with a messy, modern sensibility, Goya's Ghosts doesn't have to stretch very far to find present-day parallels," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Religious fanaticism and state-sanctioned torture have made great comebacks recently, and if nothing else the screenplay (by Forman and Jean-Claude Carrière) possesses the outsized, commendable fury of some extremely pissed-off aging hippies. Unfortunately it's also more than a little daft."

"[T]he film takes as many plot-twists as Pirates of the Caribbean; distinctly Goya in its emphasis on the grotesque, it shows none of the Spaniard's artistic economy," writes Charles Petersen in the Voice.

Nick Dawson talks with Forman for Filmmaker.

"So Milos Forman gets to hang women upside down and torture them, but Eli Roth can't?" asks DK Holm at ScreenGrab.

Update, 7/19: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir recalls the glory days of the costume drama: The Lion in Winter, Anne of the Thousand Days, "and, I don't know, Becket and A Man for All Seasons." So what happened? "No contemporary actor (except, maybe, Meryl Streep) has the mixture of theatrical respectability and movie-star cachet that [Richard] Burton and [Katharine] Hepburn and [Peter] O'Toole had, and the old high-culture audience has been whittled and niche-marketed down into insignificance.... Maybe all these circumstances go some way toward explaining the incoherent dreariness of Goya's Ghosts," which "has no clear purpose, no clear message and no clear central character. Like most costume dramas these days, it dwells on the gore, filth and violence of the past (if not as much as Patrice Chéreau's outstanding Queen Margot or Tom Tykwer's intriguing failure Perfume), but toward what end is never apparent."

"Goya's Ghosts spins a compelling narrative with an excitingly subversive hook," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "Pure paper tiger, Goya's Ghosts seems destined to resurface as part of a retrospective a decade or two hence, at which point rep-house completists will survey the synopsis and credits and ponder: Why haven't I ever heard of this movie?"

Bilge Ebiri for New York: "It's hard not to see resonances with the Iraq war while watching Goya's Ghosts." Forman: "The script was finished months before the Iraq war. There's a line in the film about how the French think they will be greeted with flowers as liberators... that was in the script! Napoleon said it to his generals. And then they said it to their troops. It's difficult to explain to people that the line was there before our vice-president said it." Via Phil Morehart at Facets Features.

Updates, 7/20: "By recreating Inquisition brutality, Goya's Ghosts aims to denounce the West's bludgeoning response to terrorism," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "But its rhetorical tactics are jejune; its comparison of 21st-century America and Inquisition-era Spain doesn't track; and its second half abandons satire for half-baked historical melodrama."

"A logy, rambling period piece, it feels about as far away from the spirit of Amadeus as it's possible to get with wigs and britches," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[I]n spite of all the vivid little details, the big picture never comes into focus," adds Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Bilge Ebiri at Nerve: "'What are an artist's responsibilities to history?' Forman seems to be asking. He never quite finds his answer."

Posted by dwhudson at July 16, 2007 5:11 AM