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Quote: "The only possible flaw with this movie was that I wanted more of it."

I find this impossible to believe unless you are a masochist. The doc seems hell-bent on portraying RR as some sort of figurehead of indie/off-beat cinema & stage...and yet you realise - watching people like Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi struggle to come up with anything remotely interesting to say...and looking embarrassed by what little they can muster - that RR's just a *u*ked-up guy with a *u*ked-up life.

There's nothing wrong with being *u*ked-up, but the desperation evident in the way this doc was assembled (I can only assume every single frame of every interview ever shot was used) is too much. It is the antithesis of editing. I ended-up walking out of the theatre (Hot Docs - Toronto - 2003), feeling that this doc wasn't even fit for Interrogation Night at a prison camp.

This is conceivably one of the most disturbing films I've seen. It's characters are painfully fragile, and the tone is menacingly dark and corrupted. Still, albeit as depressing as The Tin Drum, this is an excellent film.

Polanski's films "The Pianist" and "Death & The Maiden" make up for terribly disappointing dreck like this.

I wanted The Ninth Gate to be all that it promised, and although Polanski manages to add a macabre tone overall, it's simply not filmed very cohesively. It seems rushed, and what suffers is what's most important in stories such as this: atmosphere.

Oh and the ending...an after-thought written on a napkin, evidently.