FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

MartinHafer Aside from the lovely and moody music by Erik Satie, there isn't a lot about this strange film that would appeal to most viewers. I also have no idea why French television paid Orson Welles to bring this Karen Blixen story to the small screen...but apparently they thought it was a brilliant idea.Orson Welles directed and stars in this odd morality tale. A rich man (Welles) tells his lackey a story about a rich man paying a sailor to impregnate the rich man's wife. The lackey assures him that this is a myth and it never happened...and the story has been passed around by sailors for years. Oddly, the rich man decides to make the story true by paying a woman to sleep with a sailor of his choosing. The story is, I assume, about the corruption of money and power. Frankly, I didn't care as I found the whole thing pretentious and long-winded. I know it's seen as great art as ANYTHING by Welles is great art...even though he rarely actually finished any of his film projects. Technically, it's reasonably well made but all I know is that it left me cold and confused as to why anyone would care to make this story in the first place.

Hollywoodshack Welles' film is a great comment on greed and the love of riches, and how futile it is when you can't take it with you after life ends. Wealthy Mr. Clay demands his assistant make the story he heard on ships from sailors come true. He pays the daughter (Jean Moreau) of a business partner he ruined and a poor young sailer (Norman Eishley) to sleep together one night so Clay can be the godfather of the child they conceive since Clay couldn't father children with his own wife. There is an ironic surprise for this plan when it completes, Welles using a brilliant color scheme and expert camera angles through every shot and scene. Clay's character is especially good with Welles filling the stuffy, wicked sturdiness of his portrayal almost like greed and evil personified.

Irtisen Some films are very long. For instance Antonioni's "La Notte", again with Jeanne Moreau - sorry for being in love with her. Hardly anything happens in that movie. Though you can't keep your eyes out of the screen. Fascinating (to me, at least).The producers nowadays are afraid of "zapping". Films are stroboscopic. Add zoom and tracking. Mix the three together. You have TV's "CSI: Miami". Caruso is great fun, notably because of his caricatured acting (though he plays exactly what he is supposed to play, and he does it very well - his lines are so stupid... poor actor), but such obvious manipulation in filming is off-putting. And I get bored, so bored..."The Immortal Story" is quite a short film. But the most beautiful I have ever seen in my whole life. I could watch it again and again 'till death do us part'. People call this "movie" literary, because of (the great great) K. Blixen - I. Dinesen. It is. It is nonetheless a move of the soul, a story of tale, legend, fate, and (un)achievement. It tells us you cannot be a link of the immortal story - the chain - unless you give your life to it, and die. So always did Welles, the greatest director of all times (to me). It is all about creation: genesis, generation, transmission and... your life.

Alonzo Church This film is hardly a disaster, and certainly the themes are Wellesian. It's just not terribly interesting or believable. Old Orson Welles is a rich old merchant in Macao who believes that all the stories he hears should be factual. Accordingly, he is dismayed when an old sailor's tale he was told -- in which a sailor is hired by an aging merchant to impregnate his much younger wife -- is revealed to be false. So old Mr. Welles sets out to act out the story by finding a young woman to play the wife and hire a sailor, so that, when future sailors tell the story, they will be narrating a true tale.In addition to this plot, there are a number of underdeveloped plot points. The sailor Orson finds was just rescued from a year lost on a desert island. The lady Orson finds used to live in Orson's house, back in the days when she had a rich father. None of them really add anything to our understanding of the characters. In the end, we have a beautifully shot but glacially paced film where characters make long pointless speeches, Jeanne Moreau gets pleasantly naked, and the film ends with a very literary irony that probably worked fine in the source novel, but does not impress in this film. In other words, this is a pretty typical European art film of the 60s, right down to the plot that could, without much alteration, be remade as a porn film. If you like these kind of movies, this film will be a nice surprise. If you are like me, and tend to find these sorts of things pretentious and dull, go watch Touch of Evil instead.