Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

This engaging, very personal tribute from weird Canadian director Guy Maddin to his hometown of Winnipeg is very well done. Shot in black and white with his familiar style that reminds one of both silent cinema and the films of David Lynch, the plot has an alter ego of the director hire his elderly, domineering mother (actually b-movie starlet from the 1940s Ann Savage) and actors playing his siblings in order to relive his teenage years in the sixties, and sort of understand what makes him tick. The movie includes a lot of lore about Winnipeg that may be true in some cases and is almost certainly not true in other cases (the story about the frozen horses' heads in the river, for example, is hard for me to believe). This deadpan, funny tribute is most of all a nostalgic paean to his childhood, and a denunciation of modern capitalism mindless drive to change all things (Maddin recounts in a heartfelt way how they demolished a popular department store as well as his beloved ice hockey arena, for example). And because nostalgia of our childhood is something that most people can relate to, this makes this movie more accessible than other films of him. The film explains also the reason he never leave Winnipeg (in order to defend it, and not let others completely ruin it) as well as a lot of the obsessions in his other movies (for instance, his fascination with communist aesthetics seems rooted in the strong labor movement in his hometown).

Ledge Man!...Man-Pageants...Horses Heads Frozen In A Lovers Lake...The Two Rivers beneath the Two Rivers...The Sleepwalkers Laws...The Re-Enactments Of Family Arguments And Confusing Memories Of Yesteryear...Ghost Hockey Teams...and buildings which refuse to fall when demolished...one man must face all of this on a train, heading out of town. Before he can leave the place of his birth, he must pass through all those places which have become monoliths in his memory. Through the trains windows he sees these scenes play themselves out, or can dream them with his head pressed against the window. I've tried to watch Guy Maddins completely silent films in the past, and they've always felt excessive and thin in all the wrong places. "My Winnipeg" is a perfect marriage of auto-biography, fantasy, documentary, silent film, German expressionism, and surreal cabaret, basically all those things which Maddin draws his palate from. Manages to make Winnipeg, Canada, into a dreamy, personal, mythic place, the incommunicable way a place feels after you've lived at it all your life, the love/hate where all dreams come from, and where they all seek to escape. Oh, but there is a point about 10 minutes in, when the words "the lap...the fur...the forks..." will be repeated so many times, it will make you want to turn it off, if you don't you will have one of the most unique and even enjoyable experiences you can have with a movie. I looked forward to watching it again before it was over. Better every time I watch it!

This movie is just about as un-describable as Guy Maddin is. If you're familiar with who Guy Maddin is, then you're probably aware of this movie and how it fits into his general approach to film-making. If you're not, well, this would be a great way to be introduced."My Winnipeg" is fairly straight-forward in concept, it's just different in execution. Guy Maddin mixes fact and fiction (as he's wont to do) to make a sort-of documentary about Winnipeg, his home and geographical Oedipal complex. As usual, his approach involves some of the most strange, surreal analogies (strange because they come out of nowhere; surreal because they actually make sense and work for what he's going for); dark humor; silent era montage editing; and dark, dry humor. He narrates it himself with an angry, purposefully whiny voice, both intoning with audio the frustration he feels with the world he's trying to escape and the underlying love and passion for it. The "plot", if you'd call it that, is technically about him trying to leave Winnipeg, but by the time the end comes, you'll be convinced he doesn't really want to leave--even though he never says as much and the "plot" doesn't head in that direction.Beware: here be demons. There's sleepwalkers, frozen horses, smashed deer, and sexual undertones to almost everything. There's re-enactments, found footage, animation, digital effects, and back-projection. There's montage editing, snow falling constantly, layered images, and repeated ostensibly failed takes. It's a whirlwind of paranoia, anxiety, hysterics, and humor, all with the usual black-and-white enclosed feeling that's inherent in many of Maddin's works, the type of imagery that feels like you barely perceive it at the back of your mind and yet it's right in front of your eyes (even when it is in color). And you will laugh. There's not much else that can be said definitively about how to react to this movie, but laughter is a pretty good prediction.But rest assured (and most amazingly): It's accessible! Maddin's commentary, intertitles, and playfulness is contagious, and even though his stream of thought seems awkward and even at times repetitive, it's easy to follow and summarily follows through to a good conclusion. This is the type of movie that proves that a movie can be "weird" and still abruptly entertaining. There's just not enough of that out there...--PolarisDiB

Guy Maddin's ninth feature is a pseudo-documentary about the director's hometown of Winnipeg. It mostly focuses on his relationship with the city, but it also includes re-enactments of his family life and famous weird things that happened in the city's past. It's a bit of a mess, but, as I've said before regarding Maddin, his films play out like dreams. A mess makes sense a lot of the time. I do think the film lacks the focus of his best work, and is, in fact, my least favorite of his features. Also contributing to my relatively low opinion of it (i.e., I don't think it's one of the best movies ever) is Maddin's own narration. I loved his previous film, The Brand Upon the Brain!, but objected to the narration. It's even worse here, taking a lot of the mystique out of the silent film pastiche Maddin has been perfecting since The Heart of the World (I'm kind of hoping that he'll some day return to the stuff of his earlier works, which felt more like the films of the '30s than those of the '20s). My favorite sequences were the occult ceremony in the Masonic temple and the hockey legends game, where septuagenarians play one last game as their stadium is demolished by wrecking balls. Darcy Fehr of Cowards Bend the Knee returns as Guy Maddin, who, in the movie, is as desperate to leave his depressing hometown as he is to stay (throughout the movie, Fehr appears dozing in a train car that never seems to get out of Winnipeg). And Maddin dug up Detour's Ann Savage, possibly literally, to play his mom.