Critics reviews

The Fall captures the beauty of storytelling with dazzling cinematography and fantastical setpieces that are made even more remarkable in this restoration. Compared to the superhero schlock of today, The Fall remains exceptional for the strength of its imagination and the director’s dedication to visual spectacle.

There’s something immense about the production, about the visual splendor, and about the reserved, ultimately sturdy emotional payoff.

Tarsem’s beautiful, fanciful epic merges the storytelling fantasy of The Princess Bride with the maximalist quest narratives of Jodorowsky.

[A] bold and beautiful mess of a masterpiece, as intimate and personal as it is impossibly grand.

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.

The pacing drags and the clichéd tussle between childhood innocence and adult disillusionment can only go one way. Better to experience it than think about it, fair to say.

There are telltale signs that Tarsem has spent no small amount of time wandering through Guillermo del Toro's labyrinthine imagination, and The Fall lives and dies on the strength of Pace and Untaru's remarkable performances. It's there that the pulsing heart of this magical-real film beats most true.

“The Fall” is so audacious that when Variety calls it a “vanity project,” you can only admire the man vain enough to make it. It tells a simple story with vast romantic images so stunning I had to check twice, three times, to be sure the film actually claims to have absolutely no computer-generated imagery.

Singh makes films that inspire a bevy of similarly misused adjectives: “sumptuous,” “surreal,” “eye-popping,” “hallucinatory.” He specializes in audacious compositions, shoots in exotic locales, fits his actors in unique costumes that appear simultaneously futuristic and old-fashioned, and in only two features, including the new and fifteen years in the making The Fall, has shown a predilection for stories about, yes, “the power of the imagination.”

“The Fall” bids to sell its audience on a visionary quest full of romance, intrigue, fabulous sights and fantastic creatures...

[T]he entire film, with its multi-country collection of vivid locales, its high-toned compositions, and its unrepentant melodrama, is pretentious to the point of laughability. And yet the structure is so delicate, the ideas are so ambitious, and the imagery is so hellishly flamboyant that it's easy to fall into Tarsem's over-the-top vision... It's the most glorious, wonderful mess put onscreen since Terry Gilliam's Brazil.