The Fall: Critic Reviews

Shot piecemeal over the course of four years on locations in 18 countries, The Fall is a genuine labor of love -- and a real bore.

Does The Fall amount to anything more than a vast sugar-frosted folly? I'm not convinced it does, although its wanton extravagance is not without charm. Singh has money to burn and he builds a pretty bonfire.

The Fall is aptly named not only because it pertains to a tragic descent but because viewers will feel as if they have plunged headlong into an alternate universe with this dazzling adult fairy tale.

If the human details are often problematic, the IMAX-grade bombast, ceremonial camera, and Jodorowsky-esque eclecticism still combine for a singular spectacle.

A bewitching movie, rich in ideas and humanity, and it reminds us that fiction is real to the one who imagines it. Adults might read with detachment, but kids know the truth: It matters who lives and who dies in a story. It matters for them, and for us.

Tarsem's The Fall is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself.

Some filmmakers can imagine everything and select nothing, and while it's clear as a bell Tarsem has more talent than almost any 10 directors put together, in The Fall he's basically showing off with every new wondrous image.

The girl and the hospital patients and staff also turn up in his improvised adventure, extravagantly garbed by costume designer Eiko Ishioka.

Dazzling and delirious, The Fall is a celebration of cinema, of old-fashioned storytelling and globe-hopping spectacle.

The Fall is a technically dazzling film that instantly gratifies the eye, but falls short of appeasing the head or the heart with its visual excesses.

The Fall may indeed stumble at times, and it's certainly hard to categorize. But it's also exhilarating in reach and vision while admirable in execution. If only more films aspired to such wonder.

This convoluted, arbitrary, overlong whimsy will strike most grown-ups as childish, and is far too violent and pretentious for kids.

This is a feast for the eyes and a famine for the brain.

That's the trouble with candy, the eye kind or the tooth-decaying variety. It's only after you've made a glutton of yourself that you realize you haven't devoured anything particularly filling.

...a movie that not only expected me to pay attention, it assumed that I could.

Sometimes, looking good isn't enough.

Tarsem and his screenwriting collaborators aren't able to come up with enough interesting justifications for their sudden shifts, and soon the shape-shifting yarn just feels like lazy storytelling.

This whacked-out fairy tale for grown-ups is as stunning in its beauty as it is in its lack of logic.

For a film that wants to present itself as extravagantly dazzling, there is something thuddingly familiar and bland in its vision.

Often praised -- and rightly so -- for its incredible visuals and nonstop stylishness. I have no problem with that, except that I'm equally taken by its thematic implications.

A long, long trip through the museum

I wonder if it's unforgivable heresy to say The Cell is badly underestimated and due for revisionism while The Fall, despite its relative obscurity, is badly overestimated.

Something like a Sir David Lean epic crossed with trippy offshoots of tall tales of Zorro, Ali Baba and Pecos Bill rolled into one, The Fall is a sun-kissed companion to Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. A brilliant follow-up from Tarsem Singh.