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GreenCine Daily - ”Blindness may well be the bleakest curtain raiser in the history of the festival, a nightmarish parable of the apocalypse, directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles and just as impressive in its way as his career-making City of God,” writes the Guardian’s Xan Brooks.
“Blindness feels like a curious mix of highbrow literary aspirations and lowbrow genre fiction,” writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. “[I]t’d be easy to dismiss Blindness as Dawn of the Dead for NPR listeners or Outbreak for grad students…. But while Blindness can be faulted for many things, it also has to be respected for its ambition, craft, and effort; Blindness shows us a world of wide-eyed sightlessness, and it does so through a fierce vision that only occasionally loses focus.”
Variety’s Justin Chang finds it “an intermittently harrowing but diluted take on José Saramago’s shattering novel. Despite a characteristically strong performance by Julianne Moore as a lone figure who retains her eyesight, bearing sad but heroic witness to the horrors around her, Fernando Meirelles’ slickly crafted drama rarely achieves the visceral force, tragic scope and human resonance of Saramago’s prose.”
“The laudably-ambitious Brazilian director hurls every visual trick in his considerable book at the challenges inherent in making a visual experience out of blindness,” writes Fionnuala Halligan for Screen Daily. “Meirelles seems to struggle to find a tone, and Blindness fatally lacks tension before it tips over into bizarre final-act sentimentality.”
“It startles but does not surprise,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt. “The script by Don McKellar bears witness to a mysterious plague of blindness, a ‘white’ disease in which people’s eyes suddenly see only white light. As a cosmopolitan city struggles to cope with the horrifying fallout, a panicked government orders the immediate quarantine of those infected. The herding of shunned people into prison-like camps clearly provokes images of any number of 20th-century atrocities.”… [Full Story]
