Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

cassius da silva If you are a fan of random, loud, annoying noises and pictures; solely intended to be an eye/ear sore, then this is the film for you. I used to have very vivid, haunting, random dreams of shapes and noises when I was a child that used to haunt me at night. This film is very similar to those dreams.You would have to be another level of pretentious to give this film a positive rating, or refer to it as "art"It is nonsense for the sake of nonsense. The sole intention of this film is to wind people up. I think Jan Svankmajer did this film for a laugh to see what he could get away with, knowing full well that some so called "film critics" would still give it rave reviews, however skin crawlingly pointlessIf I could stop one person from watching this film with this review I feel that I would have made the world a slightly better placeThe only possible use for this movie would be for torture. This is far more psychologically harmful than waterboardingIt angers me that this film exists and the fact that it won an award makes me sick

zolaaar My favourite screen adaptation of Carroll's classic novel, because it's so different from the cute dreamy candy-coloured wonderland which Alice is usually visiting. I still haven't read the source material; I probably think I've become too old for it by now, but that's just a stupid excuse. Or maybe because I know the story inside and out (as depicted by Disney and other overly optimistic offerers). That's why I was so positively surprised by Svankmajer's dark and eerie version, far from what I would have expected even when I read the filmmaker's name. Svankmajer does make strange little films, from what I know and saw so far, sometimes even quite whacky stuff. This film is no exception, but it has an uniquely morbid atmosphere due to the fascinating stop-motion animation and the unsettling sound effects. There's no conventional dialog which is reduced to a minimum and mostly recited by Alice herself from a third person perspective with the attachment "...says the white rabbit" et al. This technique doesn't allow us to feel with and for Alice and to delve into her fate; it rather makes us aware that we are merely within a tale. There's no way we can get lost in the intellectual world of six-year-old Alice; she remains to be a self-contained, pretty incommunicative little girl that's just trying to get out of this nightmare (without being ignorant to oddities that constantly pass her way out), and we are just observers of her dream. It's a film made not for everyone for sure; as a squeamish romantic or a lover of the more optimistic versions, you'd probably hate it. I, for one, am all in for a morbid, decayed, rotten cinematic vision, especially when it hits a children's classic and completely turns it upside down.

chuck-526 My point of reference for Jan Svankmajer's "Alice" is Terry Gilliam's "Tideland" (Svankmajer in general and his "Alice" in particular are known to have significantly influenced Gilliam). Although the images in Svankmajer's "Alice" are definitely weirder, darker, and more disturbing than virtually any other "Alice" film, they're _not_ quite as weird, dark, and disturbing as the ones in Tideland. I at least never recoiled in shock or horror from the images in "Alice" ...although I strongly suspect that quite a few others will.The stop-motion animation is outstanding. Having a doll climb a ladder, then slide down some furniture and fall down on the floor, is something that I expected to look a little stagy with typical stop-motion animation. Instead having those images be totally believable -to the point of watching for bruises and sprained ankles- amazed me.The "sound effects" (foley) are trademark Svankmajer: hyper-realistic and quite detailed and very loud. The sound effects are virtually continuous for the entire film. We hear exactly what Alice hears; the sound track never switches to the next scene ahead of the images.One trope that's used throughout is extreme closeups of Alice's moving lips as she speaks or thinks. The effect _might_ be stunning with the original audio and subtitles--I simply don't know ...because that's not available. All that's available is an English dubbed soundtrack. (Although I watched a Netflix CD, even searches of YouTube and non-English searches via international eBay or Google turned up only one reference to a possible release of the original audio, a proposed Blu-Ray that appears not to have actually happened, at least not as of April 2011.) Although the dubbing English girl sounds about the right age and temperament, the English sounds simply don't match up with the moving lips images. This is very disconcerting, making the lips trope little more than an annoyance.Svankmajer's "Wonderland" is entirely interiors. While warped and not quite realistic, it's a recognizable combination of an abandoned barn and a tenement house ...pre WWII. I don't think anything really looks like that these days.Somehow what initially appeared to me to be just a series of discontinuous bizarre images cohered into a single film experience. I still can't explain why I remained engrossed or where the feeling of continuity came from or how I was left with a single overall emotional impression. But I was.

TheSteelHelmetReturns In the initial minutes of Jan Svankmajer's Alice one assume they're installed for a minimal and meta 4:3 version of the classic Alice through the Looking Glass story shot on video. There is very little dialogue and when the spoken word does appear it's mostly from a close up of a girl's lips narrating the story. The quality and texture of the stop motion animation is of a Gumby standard and the entrance to the Wonderland is as minimal as the on screen action. I wonder if the film is simply misconstrued as being intentionally surrealistic (Milos Forman said this film was Disney + Bunuel on the DVD cover.) when Svankmaker could have wanted to make a more elaborate version of Alice and was simply forced to adopt a minimalist style due to the technological and budgetary limitations. The film spends its first forty minutes working out the animosity between Alice and the White Rabbit. I imagine children will enjoy these sequences if their attention span can handle the silent art film pacing. Alice actually enters into the Wonderland around an hour into the film itself and it's at this point where the film deviates from the original story to indulge in Kafka-esquire surrealism with cockroaches and sock worms and other bizarre interests of the film maker. Watching the segment with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare I start to feel that I would have appreciated this film more if I were an adolescent - I fail to see much groundbreaking about this rendition of the Lewis Carroll story as it is still targeted and tailored towards those in their teenage years. There's a curiosity in seeing how the film will adopt the other Wonderland characters in this minimalist DIY style but very little outside of this interest will lure the viewer into watching this film often.