Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The opening of this film can be a little annoying with repetitive structures and attention to meaningless games and aristocrats. What kept me was the excellent camera work.It is when the female lead of this story (Delphine Seyrig) enters the frame with Giorgio Albertazzi that the poetry of this film truly begins. The dreamlike, mysterious memories and connections between these characters drives the interest.Though, what really makes this film standout is the brilliant cinematography. The dialogue and script is very intelligent but it's cold. The connection between these characters breathes some warmth and life into it. One can easily see why this film found it so difficult to get distribution and screening time, until it was picked up in underground cinema.I see Last Year as one of best works in cinema ever, so it's a pity that true art like this isn't appreciated as much as it should. Even some of the most renowned critics and filmmakers were indifferent toward the film, but you can see its qualities were so amazing that it inspired Stanley Kubrick to use the way it captures the hotel - in his film The Shining.One of the best aspects of the camera work is it's framing, the use of shapes in how stylized the art design is. The architecture of the place, the gardens and the hotel all complement the language of this cinema and it's not difficult to conclude that this film was structured by a mathematician. Needs more heart, but I will only qualify it on what it is, not what I want it to be. Based on what it is and wants to be, there's only a handful of films that can match the quality of Alain Resnais' film.

"Last Year at Marienbad" is the most enigmatic film that I have ever seen. I don't know if there is a "correct" interpretation of this film. The editing of the film make any sense of time irrelevant. Some scenes repeat, cut in without context, others replay with entirely different scenarios. The long, slow tracking shots, the muted dialogue with other people besides the main three, the way the people around them will suddenly stop moving to show the importance of the situation to the characters, and the soundtrack done mostly with organ and piano, truly create a unique and gloomy atmosphere.I am convinced the whole film takes place entirely in the characters' memories, but I can't really figure out which one, or if it's just all of them. It is unclear whether the lady, who is unnamed along with the rest of the characters, is alive or dead. The set design seems to loop in a never ending labyrinth, like the memories of the characters. I'm pretty sure that the story is told from the main three characters' perspectives, and they are each remembering what they've lost with each other, while the woman still can't decide if she made the right decision regarding whether to leave the man she is with for another, no matter what decision she did end up making (which I still can't quite decipher). This is simply my interpretation, but this interpretation (and all others) are truly irrelevant. I feel the main purpose of this film is not to simply tell a story, but evoke the emotions that these characters feel. It's a tough film to get into, but once you're into it it proves to be incredibly immersive. Eventually, we begin to feel what these characters do. We feel the loss, regret, and how close they were to love. But now this fading memory just feels like a dream, or a nightmare.

The highly acclaimed movie, Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Renais, is an unconventional and uncomfortable movie for the viewers that are used to a coherent narrative.The obsession with having uninteresting characters reciting poetry is a failed attempt to make this movie intellectually profound or meaningful.If all of this were not enough, for approximately 90 minutes, the viewer is haunted by the music from an organ that makes this cinematic experience an endless nightmare.I couldn't get any kind of excitement, just a great feeling of frustration in the end, not only because it's a difficult experience to understand but because it's extremely irrelevant.

Although he'd been active in French cinema since 1947 Alain Resnais had the misfortune to make two landmark films during the short-lived so called New Wave hiccup which lasted something like four years from the late 1950s to the early 1960s but like Louis Malle, who began his own career at roughly the same time, and was tarred erroneously with the same brush, Resnais went on to become a highly distinguished mainstream filmmaker. One doesn't have to look far to see that Marienbad has little or no relationship to the dross being turned out by Godard and Truffaut; for one thing the genuine new waveleteers took misplaced pride in shooting on the street and making a movie for a stick of gum with friends and acquaintances handling most of the technical jobs, while from the very first frame it is evident that Marienbad employed top technicians to create and shoot the stunning effects, as well as spending lavishly on costume - every single person on screen, without exception, is in formal attire, tuxedos for the men, evening dress for the women, and groomed within an inch of their lives. This leaves us with the problematical screenplay by Alain Robbe Grillet but since I have no more idea than the regular film buff of what 1) it is about or 2) what it means I'm quite happy to let the Academic-Pseud axis compare orgasms, say that it's stunning to look at and leave it at that.