Reasons to Watch & Reasons to Boycott
Reasons to watch:
Rotten Tomatoes - All Critics: 93%
Rotten Tomatoes - Top Critics: 100%
Metacritic: 85/100
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho from the also critically acclaimed Neighboring Sounds (RT 92% / Metacritic 77/100)
Aquarius
Cannes 2016 Review
The Film Stage - Giovanni Marchini Camia
The staggeringly accomplished debut feature by Brazilian critic-turned-director Kleber Mendonça Filho, Neighboring Sounds, announced the arrival of a remarkable new talent in international cinema. Clearly recognizable as the work of the same director, Mendonça’s equally assertive follow-up, Aquarius, establishes his authorial voice as well as his place as one of the most eloquent filmic commentators on the contemporary state of Brazilian society.
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Clara is the film’s heroine and Braga deserves high praise for her phenomenal performance. Stately, headstrong, and all-too-recognizably human, she’s a delight to watch from start to finish, keeping the viewer mesmerized by her charisma and intensely rooting for her victory.
Aquarius Review
Time Out London - Geoff Andrew
A drama that's credible, complex and very satisfying.
(...)
The virtue of 'Aquarius' – the title, incidentally, alludes to the name of the block Clara lives in – is that it never feels the need to sermonise: its ethical, political and psychological insights are carefully contained within a consistently compelling narrative that feels fluid, relevant and true.
Cannes 2016: Aquarius will make you want to move to Brazil - review
The Telegraph - Robbie Collins(...)
Braga has been presented with an uncommonly dense and multi-faceted role here, and she plunges into it with a kind of glossy-maned, leonine majesty, investing the character with a hard-won dignity that often has you stifling a cheer, but also exploring her flaws in gripping fashion.(...)
The film's lucid sense of place and space, helped along by the camera's eye for sensual visual detail and sound design to make your eardrums groan in delight, is one of the film's most generous pleasures.(...)
The complexities of Brazilian society, with its different social and racial strata and importance of family ties, becomes a quivering spiderweb for both Clara and the plot to pick their way through: by the film’s end, you’ll be blissfully tangled up in both, with no wish to break free.
Aquarius review: rich and mysterious Brazilian story of societal disintegration
The Guardian - Peter Bradshaw
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s second feature is the beautifully observed and surprising story of an ageing music critic staging a stakeout against the developers in her apartment block(...)
It’s a richly detailed character study, immersing the audience in the life and mind of its imperious main character.
'Aquarius': Cannes Review
Jordan Mintzer - The Hollywood Reporter
Sonia Braga shines in this rather classic portrait of a woman who won’t let go.(...)
This endearing old-age drama works best as an earnest and colorful character study, even if it doesn't really break any new cinematic ground.
‘Aquarius’ Cannes Review:
The Wrap - Ben Croll
But now that “Aquarius” has screened, there is at least one question that must be somewhat modified. We need no longer ask who will win the best actress award, but rather, when Sonia Braga does win, what will she say?
Cannes Review: Sonia Braga Gives a Brilliant Performance in 'Aquarius'
IndieWire - Eric Kohn
Braga's powerful screen presence energizes Mendonça's otherwise meditative filmmaking, a style familiar to anyone who caught his first narrative feature, 2012's "Neighboring Sounds." While that movie captured the daily rituals of a middle-class neighborhood threatened by an outside force, "Aquarius" reiterates that challenge for a single individual, in the home she's claimed for decades. Though Braga's performance sometimes outshines Mendonça's leisurely two-and-a-half hour narrative, in its better moments the two work in marvelous harmony. (...)
No matter its specific geographical resonance, however, "Aquarius" works just as well on more universal terms, particularly in its expertly crafted finale, which is rich with the spirit of defiance. Above all else, "Aquarius" celebrates the prospects of growing stronger with age, with Braga's resilience providing more than a vessel for that concern — she's a sharp weapon of resistance, both as the character and in her rousing capacity to give it life.
Cannes Film Review: ‘Aquarius’
Variety - Jay Weissberg
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s stunning 2012 feature debut “Neighboring Sounds” boldly announced a major new voice in Brazilian cinema, someone able to capture the totality of Brazilian society in one Recife residential street via a remarkably sophisticated choral balancing act. His much-anticipated follow-up is a more subtle film but no less mature, a calmer film but no less angry. Starring the incomparable Sonia Braga as a well-off widow holding on to her apartment against developer pressures, “Aquarius” is a character study as well as a shrewd meditation on the needless transience of place and the way physical space elides with our identity.
Cannes Review: Sonia Braga Stuns In Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Quiet Triumph ‘Aquarius’
The Playlist - Jessica Kiang
But “Aquarius” is a highly unusual film that lays out the basis for an allegorical correlation between setting (The Aquarius is a beachside apartment block in Recife, Brazil that is planned for demolition to make way for a new development) and State (the Brazilian political system that is, as we speak, eating itself alive), and then places in the middle of it all an individual so rounded, so emphatically unique ,and so indelibly embodied by a career-redefining Sonia Braga, that she effortlessly commands the world of the film to fall into orbit around her. It obeys.(...)
Braga is simply riveting in this gift of a role. There are so few leads for women of this age available, let alone ones in which they are allowed to be sexy, spirited, admirable, unreasonable and unlikeable, and all points in between. But additionally, Mendonça’s cool, removed style, marked by an elegantly curious but never intrusive camera (from DPs Pedro Sotero and Fabricio Tadeu) is fascinated by Clara in an unusually unsentimental, unromanced way.
Reasons to Boycott:
Some people hate that the cast protested and stood against the coup in Brazil, as we can see here:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/23/brazil-dilma-rousseff-plot-secret-phone-transcript-impeachment
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/05/23/world/americas/ap-lt-brazil-politics.html?ref=americas&_r=2
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/caught-on-tape-discussing-dilma-rouseff-top-ally-of-brazils-michel-temer-steps-aside-a7044241.html
http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2016/05/23/scandale-petrobras-au-bresil-un-ministre-se-met-en-reserve-du-nouveau-gouvernement_4925025_3222.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/26/dilma-rousseffs-suspension-is-an-insult-to-democracy-in-brazil?CMP=share_btn_fb
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