Interesteg
What makes it different from others?
Ensofter
Overrated and overhyped
XoWizIama
Excellent adaptation.
InformationRap
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
klbik
Great movie, can not stop thinking about it and it already completely changed some of my views on people. I have only realised that movie was actually silent movie when i was reading reviews of the film by people complaining about it being boring, it is everything but boring. Strongest part of the movie for me was when Delilah walks by the restaurant offering her paintwork for sale and people are looking down at her. I have almost seen myself on one of those chairs. Sad but that's how i felt and i feel so bad about it but i know i have changed. Only thing that makes me angry is that the movie is not offering some solution of this situation. I am from Eastern Europe and we have very similar problems with Gypsies since we have became "democratic" country in 80s so shame that no one back home never thought of presenting this issue in similar way so more people would start thinking of some kind of way how to fix it.
Framescourer
The only two ways in which this immediately absorbing modern Walkabout resembles the old testament couple is in love and hairdressing. Samson is living in a dessicated existential limbo with his brothers. Delilah (we assume that's her name) looks after an elderly relative. Communication in the dust bowl town is harder to come by than water. Thoughtless, reactive violence accelerates the rudimentary relationship between the two who set off out of town. Further violence, passive and otherwise, visits itself upon the two. Yet, by the end, they find themselves not only together but discovering a necessary co-existence.I was completely gripped by the film, literally unable to take my eyes off the screen for a frame in case I missed a spasm of action, a moment of meaning. Everything seems pregnant with some sort of possibility, even if that turns out to be really very nasty indeed. And yet, even by the end, I simply didn't feel that the characters had learned a great deal. Whilst the film shows a loving bond growing despite an almost total absence of conventional conversation, it also shows the dreadful isolation in which failing to communicate results. Samson's symbolic self-tonsure is a profoundly expressive moment, mimicking the earlier act of the person who has caused it, but it is directed at a void.There is a dark segregational subtext too. Where Delilah has the upward mobility instigated by compassion and an artistic bent, Samson - who may have a learning difficulty, compounded by his petroleum abuse - seems shackled with a lack of imagination. Both are part of a community kept at a vague arms length by the white community in the local town of the second act, small factions of whom use, abuse and more generally ignore them. This cultural apartheid is a dramatic colouring though and is not a part of the drama. By the end the constant, tepid conflict of that drama have an ambiguous outcome, though its clearly an optimistic one. Perhaps the conclusion from this is that, at whatever civil strata, surviving a rite of passage is intrinsic to benefiting from it. 6/10
manjits
Don't go by the fact, it's an Australian film made by a virtually unknown aboriginal writer-director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton on a shoestring budget with untrained first-time actors. "Samson and Delilah" is a movie Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog or Federico Fellini would have been proud of at the pinnacle of their glory. (And in the true Australian tradition, the next movie by Warwick Thornton may turn out to be a total dud – whatever happened to Stephan Elliott? – but I hope not.) It's made in the austere style of minimalist emotions pioneered by Bresson in 1950s and 60s. There is no background music, other than a few recordings the two characters listen to on radio or tape; and hardly any dialogues (the two 14-year old aboriginal protagonists don't exchange a single word throughout the film).Getting bored? Don't be. It's a profoundly touching and satisfying art film, the like of which we have not seen too many in the history of world cinema. It would easily be in my personal top-50 best movies of all times. However, if the best of Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, Werner Herzog and Federico Fellini bore you, then please don't bother.
incitatus3
I watched about half an hour of this clunker on the television before I fell asleep. Sadly, petrol sniffing kids who are too lazy to even pick up their own garbage are not all that interesting. Dirty, dull, dreary and decadent. If this movie wins awards, you can see why the Australian film industry is such poor shape. Will anyone actually pay to see this stuff? Samson and Delilah gives self indulgence a bad name. The ABC ran a documentary on the making of the movie, which was even worse than the film. How does this rubbish get funded? The questions were simpering and the subject matter banal. This movie isn't worth ten lines but I have to write them otherwise my comments won't be recorded.