Blindness

Director Fernando Meirelles, who reportedly reworked Blindness after it was savaged by critics at the Cannes Film Festival last May -- and who has been under attack in recent days by organizations of the blind, which have also blasted the movie -- has come under renewed assault as the movie finally opens wide. "Blindness," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times "is one of the most unpleasant, not to say unendurable, films I've ever seen." Christy Lemire of the Associated Press calls it a "pretentious, preposterous allegory." Claudia Puig, writing in USA Today, is less harsh. "The film is an often thought-provoking metaphor. But as a thriller, it becomes dreary," she observes. And Neely Tucker concludes her review in the Washington Post with this rather cryptic observation: "Meirelles, a talented director, has given us a thoughtful film based on a disturbing work of art. It achieves moments of beauty, but also leaves us wanting to like it more than we actually do."

saramago's allegory has sustained a much too literal translation to film....the mood is, naturally, one of catastrophe, but also atonal....the presentation is more one of docudrama than theatre....also, the d has a maddening and endless habit of flashing a white glare at the audience, which might as well have been sustained from beginning to end credits, for all the quality this sleepwalk delivers ....clumsily executed, heavy on schmaltz and extremely low on drama, this rendition is hopelessly purblind....save your sight for something worth watching.