Horse Money

A haunting look at the interplay between memory personal and social, and between the past and the present. Costa's subjects emerge out of shadow and into light, almost as if the light was made for them. All of Costa's Fontainhas features are dimly lit, but the interplay between light and shadow here is especially exquisite.

A zombie movie, but from their perspective, and where the source of the affliction lies in a discriminating society that cares so little for them that its sufferers have all but lost the power of speech, and can do no more than shuffle within the cracks of the world while memories of the dead past rise compulsively like a broken record playing in a room from which all occupants have long since departed. Maybe Costa's best-looking film, but his earlier works should be seen before trying this one.

Horse Money plays like an abstract horror film that is both an extension of Costa's work in Colossal Youth and a total reinvention of his unique film craft. Costa collapses time and space through a more abstract editing style that expresses Ventura's physical and psychological displacement through formal means. Vitalina is Ventura's striking female equivalent, emerging from the crepuscular void, while the elevator sequence is a masterclass in how to shoot creatively in a confined space.

15. !f - Fitaş: Hipnotize edici ve meditatif bir deneyim. Hem anlatımı hem de görsel dili oldukça yenilikçi. Pedro Costa 2014 yılında hala yeni bir sinema yapılabileceğini kanıtlıyor.

Though its narrative obtuseness threatens to overwhelm the viewing experience, 'Horse Money' is photographed in a dazzling, disarmingly singular style -- each shot its own piece of still photography, drenched in chiaroscuro and framed in suffocatingly tight, decrepit spaces whose sense of dislocation is only heightened by a 4:3 ratio. Its austere beauty and Brechtian distancing calls to mind the works of Dreyer and Straub & Huillet -- and, like those, it's hard to not feel impatient at times.

I'll need to update this review after I've seen "Colossal Youth", to which I hadn't realized this was a sequel. What I can say for now is, it's basically a video-book of kickass still photography, embellished by sparse dialogue forming only a vague narrative, and musical tracks. It's hard not to appreciate Costa's painstaking visual aesthetic, based on human portraits with sharply angular compositions and chiaroscuro-like hard lighting, but by some point it gets tired and a chore to sit through.

MORE LIKE HORSE SHIT (OR, I'M FEELING MIGHTY ARMOND WHITE-Y TONIGHT). Seriously though, this probably doesn't actually deserve such a low score, but it just so perfectly sums up so much of what i dislike in trendy acclaimed art house cinema these days, maybe better than anything since Werckmeister Harmonies. The worst part is know Costa could do so much better because i've seen his first movie. Also it's pretty much the exact same thing as A Zona just a lot shittier looking.

15 Subat 2015, ifistanbul &

I am confused about that one unlike "Colossal Youth", which is a masterpiece at least. Because in "Horse Money" Costa adds the multilayered structure of sounds, times and places to the embodiment of Ventura and that technique, especially in the elevator scene created an effect of alienation on me, which diminishes the overall poetic quality of his former films. But again, visually that's the poetry of dispossession and misery, maybe I need a rewatch to grade this one higher.