The Tales of Hoffmann

Most if not all of these performers have since died; here, they live on.

The film will never rank among my favorites in the careers of these filmmakers, but filmmaking legends as diverse as Cecil B. DeMille, Martin Scorsese and George A. Romero all adore it ...

"Hoffmann" is an immersive aesthetic experience best thought of as an art form all its own.

As a work of pure, imaginative cinema, it comes close to genius.

One of the most completely realized marriages of color, movement, and music in the medium's history.

Hard to take, despite the clear personal commitment of director Michael Powell and the enormous amount of talent on display in the photography, set design, and choreography.

The obvious care and effort that have gone into Hoffmann, the sometimes memorably contrived passages of virtuosity in the first half, make one reluctant to insist on the collapse of the work as a whole.

A gorgeous (2015) digital restoration. A fun, wittily directed and technically impressive achievement.

Encore!

It's a work of hysterical excess and flamboyant extravagance and it feels unlike pretty much anything else you will ever see in a cinema.

Only the slightly muddled structure detracts from what is otherwise an audacious cinematic experiment.

You might compare this to the 1948 Powell and Pressburger film The Red Shoes, though in many ways it is even more hallucinatory.