Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A rare dud by Saura. A French psychologist (Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla) is researching female suicide and travels to Mexico to study the life of Antonieta Rivas Mercado (Isabella Adjani), a writer and political activist who shot herself in Notre Dame. This wasn't Saura's project, he basically did it as a director-for-hire, and there's little to no passion in it. Very uneventful and dull, a lot of political information but not much insight into Antonieta's interior life. We get a sense of why she's important to Mexican culture, but not why she's a character worth spending time with. The few interesting moments (particularly when Schygulla "meets" Adjani) are overwhelmed by dry biographical data, with Adjani pretty much sleepwalking through the role. It didn't help that the DVD was wretched, clearly transferred from a VHS source, and a poor one at that.