Halloween Hype 2011, Pt. X 
Don&amp;#8217;t Look Now
[1973 / Nicolas Roeg / *****]
Roger Ebert&amp;#8217;s essay on the film better describes the brilliance and beauty of this film than I ever could. I will say that the powerful opening and closing scenes, as well as the stunningly edited sex scene, are three of the best film sequences in history. This remains on of my alltime favourite films. Region 1 really needs a blu-ray release for this, one of the most gorgeous films ever made. On to Mr. Ebert:

Nicolas Roeg&amp;#8217;s 1973 film remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension. Few films so successfully put us inside the mind of a man who is trying to reason his way free from mounting terror. Roeg and his editor, Graeme Clifford, cut from one unsettling image to another. The movie is fragmented in its visual style, accumulating images that add up to a final bloody moment of truth.
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The shiny red raincoat will be a connector all the way through. In  Venice, Baxter will get glimpses of a little figure in red running away  from him or hiding from him, and may wonder if this is the ghost of his  daughter. We will see the red figure more often than he does, glimpsing  it on a distant bridge, or as a boat passes behind two arches. And the  precise tone of red will be a marker through the movie; Roeg&amp;#8217;s palate is  entirely in dark earth tones, except when he introduces bright red  splashes&amp;#8212;with a shawl, a scarf, a poster on a wall, a house front  painted with startling brilliance. The color is a link between death  past and future.
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Venice, that haunted city, has never been more melancholy than in &amp;#8220;Don&amp;#8217;t Look Now.&amp;#8221; It is like a vast necropolis, its stones damp and crumbling, its canals alive with rats. The cinematography, by Anthony B. Richmond and an uncredited Roeg, drains it of people. There are a few shots, on busy streets or near the Grand Canal, when we see residents and tourists, but during the two sustained scenes where John and Laura are lost (first together, later separately) there is no one else about, and the streets, bridges, canals, dead ends and wrong turns fold in upon themselves. Walking in Venice, especially on a foggy winter light, is like walking in a dream.
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It is a masterpiece of physical filmmaking, in the way the photography  evokes mood and the editing underlines it with uncertainty.
