Reviews
The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“It is overpoweringly lovable. It is now touring the globe charming the pantaloons off every audience in arthouses and beyond.”
24/05/2011
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“This beautiful movie is almost entirely wordless; it is slow, precise, superbly filmed, with an almost respiratory sense of the rise and fall of the seasons and the rhythm of the countryside.”
26/05/2011
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The New York Times
A. O. Scott
“Humor — generated by incongruities of scale, the workings of chance and the intrinsic preposterousness of goats, snails and people — amounts almost to a philosophical stratagem, a way of exploring how the world works and how it looks. What is perhaps most remarkable about Le Quattro Volte is that it is at once completely accessible and endlessly mysterious.”
29/03/2011
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Time Out
Trevor Johnston
“What a pleasure to welcome a true original. Here’s a wonderful film about life, the universe and everything. It’s captivating, touching, wryly humorous, mysterious, intriguing and uplifting.”
25/05/2007
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The Times
Wendy Ide
“It has slapstick (involving a shed full of kids and a broom), pathos and a dazzling single shot set-piece involving a religious parade, a dog and, yes, a bunch of goats. It’s a sublime little movie which, in its unassuming way, touches upon themes just as weighty as those of Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or-winning folly, The Tree of Life.”
27/05/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonanthan Romney
“... both magnificent and magnificently economical. Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte will set you musing on matters natural and metaphysical, using little more than some Calabrian hillsides, a stack of logs, some snails and a herd of goats – and barely a syllable of dialogue. The film is an extraordinary achievement – beautiful, moving, mysterious, and, at times, extremely funny.”
29/05/2011
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The Observer
Philip French
“It is an essay, a cinematic poem, a spiritual exploration of time and space, and it's designed to make us think and feel about the world around us and our place in it.
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29/05/2011
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Empire Magazine
David Parkinson
“A beautiful but slow moving celebration of life, stunningly photographed.”
27/05/2011
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The Evening Standard
Derek Malcolm
“Apparently Pythagoras, who had a school in Calabria, used to teach his pupils from behind a screen. And Frammartino makes his film in the same sort of way. He never imposes upon it apart from shooting it brilliantly so that the whole seems simply part of the natural order of things rather than either a drama or a documentary.”
27/05/2011
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
“It's hard to convey the quiet beauty and strange wit of Frammartino's portrait of the changing seasons. Just watch, and wonder.”
27/05/2011
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The New Statesman
Ryan Gilbey
“It would be overburdening this pleasantly whimsical film to claim that there was anything very profound about it. But small miracles are miracles just the same, and Frammartino deserves special credit for one episode of extended and magnificent comedy, as lightly worn as it must have been painstakingly choreographed, involving a timber truck, a yapping dog, a Christian pageant and, yes, more goats.”
26/05/2011
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Total Film
Sam Wigley
“It won’t be for everyone: even viewers who are sympathetic to the slow-as-daybreak pace may find themselves nodding off to the ever-present clatter of goat bells.”
25/05/2011
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“As tedious and compelling as a video-installation piece at the ICA.
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29/05/2011
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