Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

tangymichel Dark, unpleasant movie about contemporary Greece, set by a dying father and a lost-soul daughter. Strange how you can fall in love with an actress you haven't seen before, as I did with Ariane Labed playing Marina. I guess she reminded me both physically and spiritually of an ex-girlfriend. Attractive, somehow boyish, always making the other move, both at a distance and now and then unexpectedly intimate. All the talking in other reviews about Marina being emotionally 'dead' is total nonsense. You have to (try to) understand this character, but not many men are willing or able to. To me she was the shining light in this portrayal of a depressed, bankrupt and humiliated country. This movie worked like a magnet to me. After I finished watching it, I was almost certain the director had to be a woman of about my age. I was right. I suppose Ariane has a great filming future ahead of her, but I hope she will perform in movies like this one. But it could just as well be her best role already.

SnoopyStyle 23 year old Marina (Ariane Labed) has a best and only friend Bella (Evangelia Randou) living in a small Greek seaside town. She has a job driving a visiting engineer around for the big factory. Her dad is dying and she's growing out of her shell.It's a cold deadpan delivery from everybody. Starting from the awkward opening scene where the two women try tongue kissing, this is an experimental film bent on provoking something from the audience. However the one emotion provoked in me is boredom. That's even true for the weird dance number. The monotone style really wore me out. Ariane seems like a compelling actress. Her story with the father has good potential. I just got bored waiting for things to happen.

jonrosling I'd heard nothing about ATTENBERG until I picked up a review booklet in the local indie cinema in my town and was intrigued by the premise. It's difficult to explain the story as such because this isn't really a story piece, but more of a study in character and relationships, and the human condition.As a character study the film-makers perhaps deliberately draw parallels with nature documentaries which observe animal behaviour without really making any emotional connection between man and beast. The film draws attention to this - as the main character Marina, played here by Ariana Labed, watches Sir David Attenborough on TV describing his experience of coming face to face with a gorilla. He sees it as a connection with nature like no other he has experienced. Marina herself realises that there is no emotional content in her life, no connection with those around her. Her candid questioning of her father's sexuality and the off-hand conversation about the process of cremation after his death lays bare the emotional desert that she exists in. Her cold relationship with best friend Bella, and Bella's clumsy attempts to set alight the fires of sexual yearning in Marina further show that she (Marina) is spiritually, emotionally empty.Even her attempts - ultimately successful - to lose her virginity to the nameless engineer she drives to and from work each day in her job as a taxi driver are emotionless, cold, stark. She describes each stage of their tenderness, each aspect of love-making stripping it of any feeling, warmth, humanity.Marina is played brilliantly by Ariana Labed, who hides behind a stillness in both her face and eyes, barely revealing anything except in the strange dances with Bella. Evangelia Randou succeeds in bringing darkness to Bella. She is unhindered by thoughts of feeling and emotion, tenderness and love and in every respect she plays the darker, animalistic side to Marina. It was easy to think for the first act that Bella was not a real character but a shadow side to Marina, satisfying the hidden fantasises Marina has, about sex and even, in a Freudian twist, about her own father.Marina almost gets there but the death of her father, the functional process of packing him off to Germany to be cremated (cremation is legal in Greece and has been since 2006, but is still frowned upon by the Orthodox Christian church there) pulls her back into a world that is hard and cold and stark. She stands and watches his coffin packaged, x-rayed for the flight, marked with "THIS WAY UP" stickers like some Amazon or eBay parcel. There is a moment of feeling as she chases briefly after the pick up that takes him to the plane but in the end the film pulls back from allowing the character the emotional epiphany it has been building to. She scatters his ashes into the sea, driven there by Bella, clothed in a functional visibility jacket and struggling to prise off the lid from the urn. There seems to be no feeling, except maybe disappointment that there is no deeper feeling as the waves wash him away. Marina has not opened the door to love, feeling, loss, emotion.And it's this that I struggled with in the film. What it said to me was that humans can be really no different from animals, going through the day by day business of survival. It shows people in all their functional purpose - working, eating, dying. It doesn't hold back from showing it's characters naked, like the apes in the jungle. There is a notion in this that we have a reservoir of compassion and love, and a whole glut of deeper emotions to give but that it remains untapped; and that we are perhaps trapped by our circumstance and surroundings and past and thus prevented from expressing our true selves. Our characters live in a rundown industrial town, and the story itself was written against the backdrop of riots in Greece at austerity measures and economic crisis. The film-makers and writers are asking: Is this all we are? Industry? Economy? Money? Simple black and white things? Or is there something else.But they never answer the question for Marina and her plight is left unresolved, unsatisfied.The cinematography in the film - by Thimios Bakatakis - is beautiful, still. It is a series of tableau into which movement sometimes intrudes, the emotions stirring the mind. But ultimately it is the failure to resolve Marina's dilemma that leaves the film missing that final piece of the jigsaw that would have made it an art-house classic.

stensson According to one of the main characters, Greece is a country which has moved from keeping sheep to IT, without passing industrialism. And this is not the Greece you see in postcards. It's post modernism in an ugly shape, the remains of an overrated 20th century.One of the girls here is 23 years old and has always rejected both sex and love. Her female friend is on the other hand very experienced. Their relationship is somewhat cold, although finds expression in their dancing together in a yard.A father and architect dies, not any longer believing in his 1900s. The 23-year-old girl almost talks a relation with a man into pieces. This is a form experiment, but it's not that successful. But it very much rejects that old bad century.