A Useful Life

angelicidea

Everybody is very chilled and slow in this film. I love how it plays like a silent movie with beautiful and interesting shots all the way through. Weird and wonderful and latin.

Graham Ball

An extremely 'Useful Life'... loved it, feel like I've lived aspects of it, melancholy feelings of a time gone by or in decline, but, conversely, inspires hope for the evolution of cinema.

msmichel

An excellent if brief film that stands as a loving testament to film culture and those film academics who are obsessive in their love for art house cinema. As someone who has spent countless hours watching films in a 'cinematheque' this captures that dying art of exhibition; the small crowds in a worn down cinema; the meticulous programming that hopes for public interest; and those who put their public life aside...

FilmEdie

Cinematic meditations on the death of cinema, by nature, have this meta/existential element wherein I start to wonder if the relevance of my own world view isn't disappearing with the cinematheques. Which then made the 2nd half of the film feel brutally scathing... Like Goodbye Dragon Inn via Tony Manero. A sensitive, astute, absurdist brutalism that feels like the right response to it all. Risky win with the music.

Bilouaustria

I didn´t fully appreciate the first half which was almost like a documentary but i can´t say neither that i liked the end better. The use of music in the second half is the best idea of Veiroj but the rest looked a bit depressing and it is hard to tell if it was an hommage to film lovers or if he is taking the piss at them. And what about the use of black and white here ? It is justified ? Does it add anything ?

dionysus67

Low key meditation about the end of auteur cinema, this honest and austere film makes for a splendid tribute to all National Film Theatres, their struggles, utopian vision and dissemination of important films. Never maudlin, it reverberates with intellectual nostalgia, using as backdrop cinema's inspiration for real-life love and intimacy. Jellinek is admirable as the Sisyphean cinephile before a quiet resignation.

Karthik

What a beautiful shot, a "hinge-shot", which turns the narrative: Jorge and Martinez, stump down the obscure defeated stairs, below a looming half-cut-off poster of Chaplin and his girl (at the end of Modern Times?) walking away at dawn...

DrFirestone

A quiet and subtle meditation on the state of cinema vs "modern" life, where the characters seem to be just a mere decoration. I'd say the b&w visuals made the biggest impression on me here - all the rest left me feeling somehow indifferent. Not much to say, really (and that probably sums up this film best).