Menino Malvado

It's a slow burn but it gets inside your head. Moody settings. Good timing too. Lots of flashbacks and reverse storylines that pops out just when you're about to scratch your head and wonder why or what.

Cruel Peter is a very flawed film that probably had some potential.

Its upsides are the production quality (except the CGI), music, and a couple of creative scenes.

Everything else is either underdeveloped for reasons unknown or suggests a kind of indifferent attitude towards the film.

For example, the film ignores important details and small things, which, by the way, are the building blocks of a good story. Like accents, looks, and at least, in some sense, some historical background.

The film is also overloaded with scenes that don't contribute to anything, some of these are 2-3 seconds long, and nobody says a word.

The acting wasn't so good either. Probably result in the direction. Richard Armitage-looking lead was constantly overacting, while his daughter mostly looked confused. Good effort by the Italian cast though, I wish the film had more of them.

While the visual style was interesting and added some flavor, for about 80% of the film, you can't even see it too much. The film is very, very dark. You can barely see anything at times. Half of the time, I wasn't even sure if it's day or night in a particular scene.

Overall, if the story was more creative and actually could get me hooked, I could turn a blind eye to the above problems. But in its current state, it just doesn't work.

There's a lot of potential here with this movie it's got sort of a unique take on the bad child theme it's a combination of the exorcist the omen and a couple other films that deal with similar but it's quite hard to tell what the heck is going on since everything is so dark there are times when there's action happening on the screen and the screen appears to be completely black if this was intentional it was a poor choice it's just so darn I see anything that it's hard to get too involved in it

I would have liked to talk about the plot more but the screen is almost completely black most of the time. It's barely watchable.

I love the idea behind the plot, the characters were interesting and the Italian setting was refreshing, but It was literally impossible to discern what was happening on screen most of the times.

The film is too dark. Not thematically, not figuratively, but literally *visually* too dark. Everything is too dark. It is so dark that it should be called 'Dark Peter.' The nighttime scenes are too dark; the daylight is too dark; interior and exterior shots alike are equally sodden with a filter of synthetic dusk-like gloom.

Perhaps the grader deliberately made it so dark to hide the plodding story, or the lugubrious tone, or the somnambulant editing. It was nice to see characters using BSL - a shame their doing so was obscured by a permanent shroud of (presumably) unintentional murk.

If you like looking at the world thru tights, or sunglasses at night, or a tea-hued gauze, you might enjoy this. But, even then...