List Price: $14.98You Pay Only: $7.49 You Save: $7.49 (50%)Prices subject to change.
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Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
Brand: Paramount
EAN: 9780792179269
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 0792179269
Label: Paramount
Manufacturer: Paramount
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Paramount
Region Code: 1
Release Date: September 03, 2002
Running Time: 110 minutes
Sales Rank: 2865
Studio: Paramount
Theatrical Release Date: 1974-01
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Editorial Review:
Description:
Working with elements of the traditional horror genre - second sight, ESP, warnings from the dead, a mad killer - and a cinematography of disquieting beauty and dreamlike sense of dislocation, director Nicolas Roeg weaves a fabric of anxiety that questions all reality. The evocative use of the back streets of Venice is a sinister participant in the action based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier. This intensely erotic and macabre film boasts outstanding performances by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
Amazon.com essential video:
Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now once seemed radically new with its kaleidoscopic imagery, dreamlike editing, and willingness to let mystery be mysterious on several levels of reality/illusion--plus art-house darling Julie Christie in a long, nude love scene! Nowadays, this 1974 adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier ghost story looks almost classical. Following the drowning of their child in England, Laura (Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) have come to dank, eternally dying Venice, where he is supervising the restoration of a moldering church and she is either slipping into or climbing out of madness with the help of a pair of creepy spinster sisters, one of whom can 'see' even though blind. John may share this psychic power, though he resists accepting it as the canals fill with murder victims, surface realities turn shimmery as water, and a red-coated figure--the daughter's ghost?--keeps flickering in the corner of our vision. Though surreal and perplexing, the film does eventually add up, and the ending remains a real throat-grabber. --Richard T. Jameson
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - great ingredients but not quite emiril dish
DVD: Don't Look Now:
Assuming you want horror/suspense, you could not have finer
ingredients. Great actors, author(s), cinematography, Venice
scenes, psychic phenomena. But, (besides a little too
much butt) the continuity just was'nt there in our opinion.
Lovely boats tho.
Twoseniorcitizens
Rating: - Still creepy after all these years
I saw this film when it first came out and found it...well, creepy. Now, having found it on the library shelf I thought I'd see how I'd like it. Actually I did find it more tolerable this time--less scary, but it was awfully long and I lost interest about two thirds of the way through. The cinematography is gorgous and there's a lot of beauty in the film, lots of shots of the splendid old churches. It just didn't work for me. It is supposed to be extremely mysterious, with all of the dark, decaying sumptuousness of old Venice, but there were too many night shots of the dark canals, rats, menacing people looking out of windows, etc. not to mention the poor blind psychic woman and her frumpy sister...It was just too much to take seriously and to keep the suspense up you have to take it somewhat seriously.
Julie Christie is quite beautiful in her prime and the sex scene is very nice. Personally I don't find Donald Sutherland very attractive, and the big 70's hairstyle and tight clothes of the era made him look really dorky. It might have worked better with a more appealing actor.
I do like some of Roeg's films a lot and I can appreciate his work here. If you have a high tolerance for this style you may like this; otherwise you may either have a laugh or be bored. Read all the reviews before you order it. (I'd like to change my rating to three stars.)
Rating:  - Death in Venice
Nicholas Roeg's 1973 DON'T LOOK NOW may be one of the single best studio films produced during the great so-called Hollywood Renaissance of 1969-1977; it certainly is one of the most influential. Using Daphne du Maurier's brilliantly ambiguous and mysterious novella as its base, Roeg uses her ghost story to produce what is really a meditation on time and space and the way in which fiction (and particularly film) structure our epistemological awareness of them both. The primary setting is Venice during the off-season, where a wealthy couple, John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), are recuperating from the loss of their small daughter who drowned months before on their English estate. John is working restoring a damaged sixteenth-century venetian church, while Laura is distracted by a mysterious pair of English sisters, one of whom is psychic and insists their dead daughter is trying to contact them to warn them of impending danger.
There's much more besides, and Roeg complicates matters by splintering our awareness of both physical space (by complex camera work that emphasizes reflections and disjuncture) and of time (by crosscutting future events with events taking place in diegetic time). When all this comes together, especially when John conducts a cat-and-mouse game through the labyrinthine venetian streets and alleyways looking for both his wife and for a figure in a red mackintosh that may be his dead daughter, the emphasis on filmic technique begins to go ... Read More
Rating: - Magnificent atmosphere, but the climax is a problem
Devastated by the death of their young daughter, an architect and his wife (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) spend some time in Venice, where the wife becomes convinced that a pair of sisters (Hilary Mason and Clelia Matania) has the psychic ability to contact the dead girl. The husband, however, tries to remain coolly rational about the situation, even as evidence mounts that he may have the gift himself. It all culminates in a startling conclusion.
I find I have to evaluate this film on two levels. First, there is no movie that projects an atmosphere of palpable dread and uneasiness more successfully. Every moment seems fraught with mystery and impending doom; we never feel safe in this picture. It is the payoff to the magnificent build-up where the film falls flat. The final revelation is a crushing disappointment, as it does not follow from anything that has gone before. The film is otherwise so masterful that I cannot bring myself to give it a poor review.
Rating:  - Slow.....
It's bad, when about halfway through the movie, I wanted it to end. I don't mind a slow movie if it leads up to something incredible. The ending was NOT scary, and it was so anti-climatic that I was expecting more. THIS IS IT????
Positives:
Some good suspense, which seemingly had nothing to do with the story..
Julie Christie naked
I'm not a fan of gore or anythign like that, I really do like a good suspenseful movie. This one just does not deliver.
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