What makes it different from others?

How sad is this?

Good start, but then it gets ruined

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

It's 1792 Madrid. The Inquisition is interested in painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård)'s provocative art. Luckily for him, brother Lorenzo Casamares (Javier Bardem) is his supportive patron. Inés Bilbatúa (Natalie Portman) is brought into the Inquisition for not eating pork. She is accused of being a Judaiser and put into a stress position called The Question. Her rich merchant father asks Goya to invite Lorenzo for dinner. He in turn puts Lorenzo into The Question to coerce an outlandish confession. He blackmails Lorenzo to help get Inés released.The first hour is terrific. It has dark and tense turns. The characters are great. It builds up a compelling drama. The first problem starts with the family letting Goya leave as they torture Lorenzo. He could easily have gone to the authorities. It's a small logic break but then the story expands in scope and out of shape. This could have been a great movie if it stayed small. Milos Forman goes crazy and then the French invades. The second half is more convoluted and there are too many convenient turns. By way of explaining, I almost half-believed in this as a real Goya story. Granted, I don't know anything about the artist but these characters seem real enough. By the second half, there is no chance that this is anywhere near reality. This is half of a great movie.

A rapist and his victim reunite in turbulent times. All the while a great painter keeps his eye on them.Wildly misconceived story. The painter character has his part early on, but becomes entirely unnecessary to the story, and it's obvious the writers got up to all sorts of shoe-horning.There's plenty of pleasure in the performances, although the guy playing Goya is all at sea in a really messy role. The characters are simple, and I suppose the mood of the story finds its proper level with the bleak 1960s style mockery in the restoration/execution scene at the end.There are a few stabs at humour, but the deaf-signing clown is really unfunny and eye-rollingly uncinematic. Music all over the place too.Overall, it feels like something forced together by committee. But there were only two members, director and his fellow screenwriter. Weird.

I was not aware of this magnificent film until 2010 and did not see it till now (May 2011), but it not only does not date, but Natalie Portman was a revelation, considering I have just seen her in Black Swan, and in this much earlier film, she was already proving her acting prowess. Javier Bardem proves his worth as much as in his later award winning films (The Sea Inside, No Country For Old Men, etc.) and I wonder how such a craggy-looking man can be so charismatic. Bardem has something unusual, a rare quality of conveying total realism in his acting which becomes him, not just a superficial persona he puts on. The supporting cast, especially Stellan Skarsgaard as Goya, provide a worthy backdrop for the two central, very powerful roles played by Bardem and Portman who convey the darkness of the period in excruciatingly detailed performances, then reflected in Goya's paintings. The film brings to life Goya's dark, realistic portraits of humanity in all its terror, grotesqueness, cruelty, and suffering during a tumultuous period of war and carnage. A brilliant film by Forman and I recommend anyone wanting a challenge in film to see this if they haven't already done so.

What a disappointment it was to learn that one of my favourite directors, Milos Forman, would go to Spain where animal cruelty laws do not apply and would exploit that loophole to abuse and kill animals for our entertainment.A chicken is trampled by horses, a real animal carcass is thrown into a field so that vultures can be shot, horses are abused and in obvious distress. And unlike civilized countries where this can all be done with special effects and animatronics, Forman took the cheap route and caused harm and death to actual living creatures."The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by how well it treats its animals." ~M.K. GandhiSpain, you blew it.Milos, you blew it.I realize that there are those among you who do not care about real animals being killed or abused in films. That is your prerogative. But I, for one, wish someone had warned me before I wasted my money on this. In case there are others out there who feel the same way, this is your warning. Do an IMDb keyword search on "actual-animal-killed" if you want to know what other films to avoid. Hint: if it was filmed in Spain, Mexico, USA pre-1965, Korea, Philippines or China, you can bet the animal cruelty/killing on screen was real.