Pedro Fernández

"If Foster were not the person at the helm, we might suppose this was some bizarre surrealist mock-fantasia, but because it is Foster, it actually only ends up being bizarre. At certain intervals, while dialogue is supposedly going on between beaver-Walter and the youngest son, even the young Stewart can hardly suppress the look of unbelief at the proposition that he is actually talking to a puppet. And that’s one of those few telltale signs that you’ve got a mess on your hands."

"The value of Le Quattro Volte consists in the way that it enamors the willing viewer and brings him face to face with this, and everything else. And you don’t need Hesiod and Pythagoras to make sense of that."

"If Foster were not the person at the helm, we might suppose this was some bizarre surrealist mock-fantasia, but because it is Foster, it actually only ends up being bizarre. At certain intervals, while dialogue is supposedly going on between beaver-Walter and the youngest son, even the young Stewart can hardly suppress the look of unbelief at the proposition that he is actually talking to a puppet. And that’s one of those few telltale signs that you’ve got a mess on your hands."

"It is the kind of film, in other words, which wears its weirdness not just proudly, but as its very reason for being—I’m strange, therefore I am. The point here is not the basic ingredients of plot or character, because the characters are all either stereotypes or ideograms of a sort and the plot gossamer-thin, but the variations on plotlessness and characterlessness."

Anybody wanting any lessons on how to be socially conscious without being too obviously tendentious in portraying a regional struggle in film ought to take notes, because in his full-length debut, The Colors of the Mountain, Colombian filmmaker Carlos César Arbeláez manages just that—an accomplishment made only the more astonishing by the fact that in the film Arbeláez also engages another, equally perilous narrative archetype: the loss of innocence in the face of trauma.