CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

hareendranep This film deals purely with human emotion.And director did this in a heart touching way. A boy in search for his father with an old lady who is not related to him. The most beautiful and sincere movies i watched in 2017. A Must watch for those who are interested in movies portraying helpless human in various turns of life.

GusF Known in English as "Central Station," this is an inconsistent film with a flawed premise. This is the first film in many a year that I watched because I had to rather than because I wanted to as it was assigned viewing for a Law and Film group of which I am a member. It is not the kind of film that I would ordinarily choose to watch as it is rather depressing in spite of its would-be moving moments. The script by Walter Salles can never seem to decide on a tone and, at the end of the day, I didn't care what happened to the characters, which is never a good sign. On the bright side, the film looks great and it was interesting to watch my first film in Portugeuse - and only my second entirely in a language other than English or German - but I wish that my introduction to Brazilian cinema had been more successful.Fernanda Montenegro is very good in the Oscar nominated role of Isadora "Dora" Teixeira and it is a shame that the film could not have been on the same level as her performance. A cynical, bitter retired teacher, she writes letters for illiterate people at the major Rio de Janiero train station Central do Brasil. Half the time, she does not even send the letters, either tearing them up or sticking them in a door which her friend Irene compares to Purgatory. After one of her customers, a woman named Ana Fontenele, is knocked down by a bus, she takes in her son Josué Fontenele de Paiva but it is not out of the goodness of her heart. She sells him to child traffickers for $1,000, which she then uses to buy a new TV. Dora is an intelligent, well-educated, perceptive woman so I find it very hard to believe that it had never occurred to her that he would be killed and his organs would be sold until Irene points it out to her. She then experiences a crisis of conscience and steals him away from the dreadful place where she sent him in the first place. The film is concerned with her supposed redemption but it did not work for me because I don't think that she could be redeemed after that.In order for me to find a character interesting, they have to be either sympathetic or compelling and, unfortunately, Dora was neither one. I don't have a problem with characters doing terrible things if the storyline is gripping or, far less often, if it is able to redeem them. For instance, I was fascinated by Judah Rosenthal's existential moral crisis after he became heavily involved in a murder in "Crimes and Misdemeanors", which I watched only last week, and Michael Corleone's gradual descent into darkness in the first two "Godfather" films is a beautifully told, engrossing story. The problem with this film is that I don't think anything that Dora did or perhaps even could go any way towards redeeming her. She clearly regretted it, which is something, but I think that committing the act was unforgivable and there is no way back from that. I had much the same problem with "The Godfather Part III" actually but that was far from its only flaw.Because of this, I did not find Dora's bond with Josué - who is played by the rather bad child actor Vinícius de Oliveira - very sweet or believable as I was presumably supposed to. Frankly, I could not get the child trafficking thing out of my head for a single second during the film. She warms to him and does admittedly become a better person as the film progresses but it can't erase what happened earlier. She embarks on a trip across Brazil with Josué, albeit trying to abandon him several times along the way, so that he can find his father Jesus, a shiftless drunk who beat his mother while she was pregnant with him. Is this really all the poor child has going for him? He eventually finds his half-brothers, who are nice enough, but it is heavily implied that his father will never return in spite of a letter to the contrary. This is for the best as Josué might be able to actually experience real happiness, something which I certainly didn't while watching this film. Besides Montenagro, Marília Pêra, who sadly died in December, as Irene is the only actor who particularly stood out. Overall, the film hinges on being able to forgive Dora, which is a flawed premise in my view, so it did not do much for me, I'm afraid.

gavin6942 An emotive journey of a former school teacher, who writes letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, as they search for the father he never knew.Critically, this film did really well, winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film and getting Oscar-nominated not just for a foreign film, but best actress as well. Sure, it did not win either Oscar, but that is still an impressive feat.According to Richard Schickel, the film is "an odyssey of simple problems, simple emotional discoveries, a relationship full of knots that Salles permits to unwind in an unforced, unsentimental fashion. His imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting." Beautifully said, Richard. That is ultimately what makes great cinema: "an odyssey of simple problems".Director Walter Selles went on to make "Dark Water", "The Motorcycle Diaries" and "On the Road".

Atreyu_II 'Central do Brasil' is exemplary when it comes to simple film-making. It doesn't try to be something it isn't, always remaining pure on its simplicity. It follows a "less is more" philosophy, which means that the simplest things can be good.This Brazilian piece of cinema is almost a road movie, although it does a good job in two different things: taking us to the streets of Brazil and to places outside of the town. I'm not Brazilian, but I'm sure this movie makes Brazilians proud... provided they like it, of course.This motion-picture tells the story of Dora (a grumpy and apathic middle-aged/old woman), an ex-school teacher who writes letters for illiterate costumers as a job and Josué, a poor boy who just lost his mother tragically and son of a father he never met. This lady and this boy, so different in personalities and ages, have a troubled relationship at first and during much of the movie. They have a really hard time to get along. But later they do and well. And yet, just when things are getting fine for them, circumstances force them to separate from each other, although they find ways to remember each other. In real life, the boy developed a great friendship with Fernanda Montenegro and to this day they're still close and in touch.Fernanda Montenegro and Vinícius de Oliveira do their roles well.