Opiniones de usuarios

Following the comments that have been posted up until now I also think this movie could be a little bit shorter or faster paced. Besides that...

Everything suits and fits the style that was intended. I'm not familiarized with the work of Manoel de Oliveira but I sure loved the consistency and emotional tension delivered by this fair example of good Portuguese movie production. Loved the cinematography and casting as well as the soundtrack which is nothing less than minimalist and straight to the point.

A sad story told in a "sad" way. The absence of dialog in some scenes is almost scary due to the tension involved around the baseline of the plot. The two main actors are capable of making us believe they are truly feeling broken inside, lost in their own senses, confused by an harsh reality, truly great work by everyone involved.

I'm not gonna write about the plot itself because if you're reading this you probably are already familiarized with it but I can say I was very depressed at the end and that's good in a drama.

By the end credits you feel ready to cry under your sheets. What you've just watched and felt is too catastrophic and heartbreaking to belong to reality and the scary thing is that you realized exactly that. There's little fiction about the whole thing...

7/10

I'm not a big fan of Portuguese movies but this was a step in the right direction for Portuguese cinema. It was shot with great detail and mastery, showing an image with a quality comparable to any Hollywood movie. However the photography was above the average of any typical Hollywood movie for it showed such special care which resulted in an involving touching experience. The soundtrack was very good too and very adequate. It was simple and effective helping to create an environment of deep sadness and anxiety. The plot is very simple and you can figure it out in the first 5 minutes, however this movie isn't about the story, it's about feelings and it is in that sense that I think it deserves, at least, 7 out of 10. The feelings of sadness, anxiety, hope and love are the main theme of this movie, and they are passed on to the viewer in such a sublime way that at the end of the movie you feel you ... (you'll just have to see it) What I tell you is that it's impossible to feel indifferent with this movie.

Only reason I didn't give it a better rate is very personal, I just don't like depressing movies...and this movies does push the same button a little too much.

"Alice" is a sad and deep movie about a missing child. Mário (Nuno Lopes) is a father of a little girl that is missing and since then his life is a complete routine… Each day he does every little step he had done the day she disappeared. He walks in the same streets at the same time, he catches the same train and sees the same persons, and he goes to the same places (including her school). He's in deep despair, and as he can't do anything else, he does that routine hoping she will pass again in one of these places one day… Beside that he mounted a "vigilance structure" with a large number of video-cameras installed in some friends' houses which record some of those streets (he also have friends at the airport and metro security who lend him some vigilance tapes). He's really convicted that someday she will appear in one of these cameras…

It's a very sad and touching movie, because it's about a matter that is always hard to "talk about". The plot is very simple in its structure, because it's very straight and easy to follow, but at the same time it also gives us a feeling of complexity, of something that it's not explained: We don't know, for example, who are these characters or how did Alice disappear.

The movie is a bit slow and melancholic, but it's just the way it should be to a story like that. The music, which is a very beautiful piano piece, helps a lot to this ambiance of melancholy and deep sadness; but also the footage, because all film is shot in a grey light, as if an enormous cloud had arrived over Lisbon…Very nice too, and totally connected to the ambiance of the story.

The character of Nuno Lopes (Mário) is also very well portrayed, because it has the typical figure of a person which is lost in life: Sadness in his eyes, unshaved face, defeated posture, always a serious expression… Excellent job done by Nuno Lopes and the production of this movie!

There is much to be said about this one. It's fantastic to be able to appreciate such a picture, to live the moment where this finally happened. I don't know much about M.Martins, i hadn't heard of him before this one (and practically no one had). i also don't know what he'll do next. But i put this one along with a very few number of "difficult to get better" first tries by any director (a list with titles such as "a bout de soufflé" or "citizen kane").

The city is the theme. Forget the story. It is there. Period. It serves the purpose of grasping a city hardly seen on screen before this. Period. that's all there is to say.

So this succeeds where "Ossos" and "O fantasma" had failed completely; in showing Lisbon out of clichés, of preconceived warmed up imagery's. Time goes on, cinema has to catch it. This is catching up with time.

This brings the city to zero ground. The screens (how many do we see during the film?) that belong to Lopes's character are the white canvas where actions draw themselves, in blue. The camera (an experimenting young director, says me) tries to fetch them, tries to make them eternal, all the scenes, everywhere. Lopes (the actor, real life and in this film) tries to get to them, he participates, he can even show up in front of a camera, but he can never control it. So, the actor as a pawn, constantly exposed, never in control. This is cinema, and Mário (Lopes) understands it the moment he sees 10 times his face on the screens of a store. He also performs a play, a comedy, inside the play which is the film. Double manipulation. Great material! He is an actor, manipulated to appear the way this visionary director wants, and he plays an actor, who is forced to perform something he is not the least interested in, to be able to proceed with his other function, which he thinks he controls, but he doesn't.

The camera can be "god", a character, or it can grab a character and follow it. The camera can be the spectator, our curiosity moving around. Here, the camera is a mood, a spiritual landscape, such as the music. It's a dot placed on the infinite. So it doesn't matter if it focuses or unfocuses, or what it focuses, first or second plan, cars pass in front, also people strange to the scenes (every people are strange here). "Freewill" framing, apparent chaos, apparent "no man" camera. This is the true quality of Alice. All so contemporary, all so apparently chaotic, still, everything controlled we don't know how, nor by whom. This is Lisbon.

Still, i don't hold the optimism (nor the skepticism) of the common Portuguese cinema buff. I don't watch this one as "the new path that will improve Portuguese cinema for good". One film, especially on this author basis, doesn't change a hole (inexistent) cinema industry. But i do think that, from a cinematic point of view; this is worthwhile, and has a place on the top of my shelve.

Dialogs subtle, right, rigorous. Music may be the only apparition of the missing Alice. Photos, flyers and even Alice herself don't count. This is one of the best minimalist soundtracks ever. Glass would make Koyaanisqatsi differently if he could have seen this first. But than again, this is so much better than Reggio's living-death tail of industrialization.

The city is blue, so is Alice's coat, he's always seeking blue... and failing to find it. Think about. You should watch this along with "Lisboetas". This one first.

My evaluation: 5/5 fantastic cinematic essay.

P.S. - I just feel pity that watching the making of and the extras makes me feel that this was all luck, and no one involved gave a single thought to what i just said. I wish the extra material could be more useful than just curious (it could be both).

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One of the best Portuguese movies ever produced. A simple, straight story about Mario, a father searching for his missing daughter - Alice. Shooted in a dark, depressing way with strong and moving roles. Mario creates an illegal video surveillance network all over Lisbon, watching hours and hours of DV tapes every day in high speed, expecting to see some clue about Alice. One day the search seems to be over. If you like to watch different cinema with alternative views and ideas you can't loose this one! Won a prize at 2005 Cannes Festival. The music by Sasseti is also intense, somehow like some tunes by Tiersen in "Lenin" or "Amelie".

Everything in this movie is really well done.From the breathtaking performances from the leading actors, the amazing photography, the fantastic soundtrack(which is repetitive,but it relates to the sense of routine the main character has come to terms with) to the way that Lisbon is shot, it is a must-see for anyone who enjoys great dramatic movies.It is great to see a Portuguese movie that IS NOT a Manoel de Oliveira wannabe.It is also kind of minimalistic and slow, but it has it's own way of telling a story.This movie came as a surprise to me because I have never seen a Portuguese movie so well done.It is the supreme evidence that less is more.I can't wait to see Marco Martins' next project.

This movie by Marco Martins is the portrait of two characters played by Nuno Lopes and Beatriz Batarda (best Portuguese actress ever) whose child disappeared, Alice. Watching "Alice" isn't watching one of the more award-winning Portuguese author movies, that keep saying nothing about Portuguese culture or society. "Alice" is truly a masterpiece. Not of directing, but the film as a whole is an impressive piece of art. The score played by Bernardo Sasseti is surely one of the best we've ever listened to, not just in Portuguese cinema but in others too. The music fully transmits the father's loss, and on the other half the cinematography, with the blue tone of color during the entire picture, haunts us with Alice's presence, beside she never appears in the entire picture, but she's the reason the movie happens. The movie is about hope, and absolutely about it's loss, because we fight so many in time to achieve something that sometimes we get tired and quit on the edge. "Alice" quits

Yep, here's comes another Portuguese Tsai Ming-Liang... Another guy that thinks it's pretty cool to make a whole movie out of two pages of dialogue; that believes that rainy days, blue-tinted cinematography, Satie-like piano and the constant droning of passing cars and passing trains are an original way of expressing the anguish of modern urban existence; that pointless boredom, however well filmed (as indeed it was) can ever be something different than pointless boredom. What is truly absent in this movie, besides poor little Alice, is a story, as ever that detail that is never allowed to get in the way of the Big Ideas, Big Characters and Big Images of our filmmakers (except João Canijo, that at least makes the effort of riping-off Shakespeare). All the artistry in the world cannot save such an empty, empty, object.

A distraught father, Mario (Nuno Lopes), establishes for himself a Sisyphean task wherein every day he meticulously repeats all the mundane activities he did the day his 3-year-old daughter, Alice, went missing. He is guided by the notion that Alice would somehow gravitate towards those places where they spent their last moments together, just like a magnet. He ensures that if she ever does come back, he wouldn't miss it.

Though it is a rationale that seems a bit far-fetched and too much to expect from someone barely a pre-schooler, the people around Mario sees this and others even dare to point out its futility, all of which he just nonchalantly shrugs off. Even his wife, Luisa (Beatriz Batarda), an inconsolable nervous wreck and seen most of the time slumped on their bed, still has some lucidity to question the unusual methods of his search.

Mario's unyielding spirit is the focus of this film, a well-rounded performance from Lopes, a grieving figure seen most of the time handing out missing-child pamphlets of his daughter to motorists and passersby. Then his self-imposed ritual has him visiting different places, apartment flats, shops and building rooftops to collect the cassette tapes of the surveillance video cameras that he has been permitted to install. He then scours those numerous tapes simultaneously at the end of the day to search for any signs of Alice, all with varying degrees of success. Success, in his case, is him being able to spot anyone remotely similar to a small kid wearing the same blue coat that Alice wore the day she disappeared, those images he then captures and prints and painstakingly document. Such are the tasks which he has to do again the next day and so forth. Some might call that just downright stubborn, others an unwavering sense of hope, which is the thing that drives the narrative of the film. Not even the obsolescence of the equipment seen used by the protagonist robs it of its effectiveness in conveying allusions. Seeing some blurred low-resolution image of a kid he suspects might be his daughter goads him to continue on with his routine, because if faith is indeed capable of moving mountains, perhaps it could pick up a giant boulder and make it disappear.

Marco Martins brilliantly rendered, in equal parts, the sullen and the sumptuous cityscape of downtown Lisbon. All praises for infusing that imagery with the playful motifs from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the somber musical score by Bernardo Sassetti. These elements contribute in eloquently evoking the melancholy of modern-day urban living. An outstanding debut film, if not an unforgettable depiction of someone's gloom.

Another of Martins and Lopes' later collaboration, an examination of the impact of the 2010-2014 Portuguese financial crisis on the lives of ordinary people is the drama São Jorge (2016), which somehow is in the same vein as this film, also inspired by real events as stated in the film's end credits, providing a cinematic snapshot of what issues a family goes through when faced with such a devastating loss that hasn't any form of closure.

Nothing can amplify the tragedy for the viewer even more than what follows that scene in police station after Mario and Luisa finally decides to report the disappearance and learns about the limits of what that office could provide in their search for Alice.

--A-plus--

The movies is great in all the point that Jorge TC mentioned. but still the movies is way to long and boring, nice soundtrack no doubt, but too much Manoel DE Oliveira wannabe. A good performance by the father, the girl in the shoe store was so pretty. The film is very sad and i think it was very oriented to the story of a Portuguese kid that disappeared and is parents say he was kidnapped. The film is made using some unknown Portuguese actors in the main parts but some more experimented felling the blanks. Not a bad acting and a sad story, to bad for the really slowing pace of the movie. If you liked this movie you really gonna like "Um Tiro No Escuro", way better movie.

This movie is one of the best made in Portugal. Nuno Lopes proves that he is a magnificent actor and if he was born in USA, he was a Oscar winner! I hope, one day the world of cinema recognize that. Portugal is a country that doesn't support cinema, but we have genius like Manoel de Oliveira, João César Monteiro, João Pedro Rodrigues, Miguel Gomes, Gonçalo Waddington, Nuno Lopes, Beatriz Batarda, ... Sublime.

There are a lot of films about missing people, and even though the theme is not so common in Portuguese cinema, it is necessary to consider that the Portuguese will be able to effortlessly name two or three foreign films on the subject. How to do it differently? It's difficult: either you invent something very "outside the box", or you make a film about a real and concrete case, with a minimum of rigor and respect for the events. Marco Martins went a third way: his film takes inspiration from real cases that are somewhat popular in the media, but it does not report any true situation and tries to appear original. First of all, we must congratulate those involved. I'm somewhat hard on Portuguese cinema, but I'm fully aware that, in our country, making cinema is almost an act of intellectual rebellion. And with "Alice", Marco Martins made a good entry into the seventh art and won great praise at some international film festivals.

The strength and value of this film were solidly based on four qualities that are fair to praise: a good script premise, excellent cinematography, a good main actor and a quality original soundtrack. These are solid values and must be mentioned in any review or critical text about the film, but frankly, it seems not enough to qualify it as a good film. The Portuguese are good artists, they have a less detailed and poetic spirit, but they are terrible storytellers and this perhaps has a certain responsibility in the way in which, in cinema, there is a predominance of technical art and photography over the story told. It's something I will never accept because I see cinema in a diametrically opposite way, as a way of telling a good story.

Nuno Lopes courageously assures the main character. The actor is famous among the Portuguese thanks to an enviable career on television, but he also had a good career in theater and cinema, and is an excellent professional. He perfectly embodies the anguish of a father who desperately searches for his daughter, and who clings to his last hopes. Unfortunately, he is alone in the film: Beatriz Batarda has almost no material and time to show us his worth, and the rest of the cast has characters so weak and uninteresting that they don't even deserve to appear in the film.

The plot is based on excellent premises: Alice's disappearance and her father's search for any clue that leads to her whereabouts. Unfortunately, Marco Martins is good at directing, but not at writing a script, and he forgot that a good idea is not enough: you need to develop it, and this idea needs an effective, convincing development and a happy conclusion. . The film is full of loose ends and problems. For example, where are the Police? And no one informed that father that taking video images without permission in a public place is a crime? Why doesn't the film explore more of the relationship between the father and the girl's mother? And why redo, every day, the routine of the day she disappeared if it is already predicted that this will not help in finding her?

Technically, the film relies on a hazy photograph that expresses the psychological interior of that father. Lisbon's urban landscape could not seem more hostile, more devoid of life and color (and Lisbon is an airy and bright city). I really liked that, and also the piano melody by Bernardo Sassetti, which makes everything even more sad and melancholic. However, it is exhausting to endure the almost pedestrian pace that the film takes on and which, combined with the cinematography and the piano, turns this film into a wake or an attempt to cure insomnia.