The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A masterfully crafted arrow which, however, takes a too direct path to its target and is above all TOO LONG, in addition to being made of components that we already know too well. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button spoke to me with its magical first third full of sincere kindness and breathtaking effects that turn the digital Brad Pitt into a better actor than the real one we see later. But the rest is filled with cotton wool, having little to offer beyond things that are superfluous to Benjamin’s story. Overall, it’s a nice movie, but not the film of the year. David Fincher is wasted on such mainstream audience ass-kissing. This is paradoxically his least interesting and controversial work. (02/01/2009)

After a second screening, I was able to fully appreciate this moving meditation on life and death. It just confirmed for me the well-known truth that great films are to be enjoyed in the darkness of the cinema, with quality sound and image, and that it is for films like this that the big screens are made. The film flew by so that the 2 and a half hours felt like half an hour, I lost track of time and enjoyed the hypnotically captivating symbiosis of image and music. Then the emotions surfaced naturally, I would have set a lot of the thoughts expressed there in stone, and I guess it's true that the more you have experienced and the more you realize the transience of time, the more the film speaks to you internally (my mother was bawling like a baby). Cinema magic. Thanks, David. (02/09/2009)

I have a lot of respect for David Fincher, not just because of this magnificent drama. It's incredible the way he can present a film to the audience. The story is original. Brad Pitt’s performance makes this film really unique and unbeatable!! 100% for the great cast, the idea, and the way it’s presented. (02/11/2011)

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is definitely a film you need to watch multiple times. Depending on our frame of mind, we can appreciate the individual components, Fitzgerald's theme, the lavish acting of Pitt and Blanchett, or Tilda Swinton's perfect little performance, who manages to steal a good half of the film for herself. I have a soft spot for the atmosphere of pre-war New Orleans and I'm glad Fincher paid homage to it in this way. (03/21/2013)

Unlike Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is not a celebration of an exceptional "fool", but much more an ad absurdum led by a metaphor for the ruthlessness of passing time, which unites and divides and does not take hostages... We do not find herein a fundamental part of a great history that the heroes would, like Švejk, circumnavigate in a cocoon of wise madness; Benjamin's journey is more pensive, simpler, and not as epic. In this respect, it is much more like Burton's Big Fish - it is not a metaphor for great society, but a metaphor for one life, one time, into which the times of the other characters are freely intertwined. The uniqueness of everyday life, the search for ideal balance, the fateful chaining of various timelines and the extraordinarily conciliatory picture of old age, is all loosely chained around the picture of a clock that goes backwards. Fincher tells a fairy tale in which the tones of harmony do not dominate, but rather the tones of melancholy and a kind of conciliatory realization that everything passes away, regardless of the direction in which time passes. Finiteness is immutable. Perhaps at first I was missing some more individuality, although the sense for detail, the wonderfully pastel visual and the fantastic pace of the storytelling are admirable. But that is not what this is about. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a Hollywood film, it has the philosophy of Hollywood (it does not offend), and has Hollywood emotions (it does not offend). The sentiment is balanced by the absence of an epic idyll. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a film about mortality, not immortality... That's why it is able do something more than an ordinary love story – evoke a feeling of deep participation. The film succeeded from my perspective, even though its wisdom is a bit typically “old". (02/15/2009)