The Pale Blue Eye

I found Melling's acting terribly irritating for the first half hour, but then somehow it clicked; he’s a weird guy. I once read somewhere that every person has some equivalent of an animal, in my eyes he is a bat. If there's ever a remake of Nosferatu, I vote for him with all my limbs. Otherwise I really liked the visuals, the real locations, I really liked the candlelight and the eye-catching contrast it created; the atmosphere was delectable, the cold added so much. The pace was ok, I like these slowly told stories, and the twist at the end after the first reveal surprised me. I have no problem with this film, unlike my already oversaturated colleagues here. (01/22/2023)

Oh, my God, that was like 14 days long. Otherwise, it's a classic "Guess the murderer" type crime thriller with some pretty cool period visuals and an unexciting but average Christian Bale, but the running time is just horribly tedious. A skippable piece that no one will remember in two days. (01/10/2023)

The Pale Blue Eyes had a lot of potential to become an atmospheric period crime classic featuring E.A. Poe as a character. After watching it, however, I have to say that that the potential remains woefully untapped. Above all, the film suffers from a long running time and slow pace – the story could certainly have fit into a hundred minutes and would have been more compelling and tight. Even from an audiovisual point of view, the film didn't work on me as I expected. I do, however, praise the last third and its two twists. The first is oddly predictable, but the second is quite surprising, though it have come 20 or 30 minutes earlier. Poe's character was fine, but by the end it was too much. Better three stars! (01/13/2023)

Another standard Netflix disappointment, which seem to pile up more and more each year. Scott Cooper, Christian Bale, and a promising blend of mysticism and 19th-century detective story all fall flat here. The plot is dull and empty, undeserving of such an intriguing premise, and it drags on for over two hours. The worst part is that there’s a lot of good work put into this film. With a better script, it could have been fantastic. Instead, Harry Melling's performance as Edgar Allan Poe is stellar but ultimately wasted. (01/16/2023)

Occultism, a treacherous heart, or a motif as old as humanity itself? The criminal plot was meant to be intriguingly woven with the problematic personality of the founder of the detective genre (Melling, with his cheekbones, could easily play a vampire from an eighties horror film without needing makeup), but it somehow didn’t succeed in the candlelit gloom. Anticipation for a gothic crime film with horror elements wasn’t entirely dampened, but it seems that in terms of tightness and the ability to build atmosphere, Scott Cooper is starting to run Out of the Furnace. The final shot will leave only those uncertain who don’t know how the Guardian of Gotham manages to cope with loss and work at heights. (01/17/2023)