Alice

A film with qualities, but it is almost unbearable to watch due to a slow pace that tires the public.

There are a lot of films about missing people, and even though the theme is not so common in Portuguese cinema, it is necessary to consider that the Portuguese will be able to effortlessly name two or three foreign films on the subject. How to do it differently? It's difficult: either you invent something very “outside the box”, or you make a film about a real and concrete case, with a minimum of rigor and respect for the events. Marco Martins went a third way: his film takes inspiration from real cases that are somewhat popular in the media, but it does not report any true situation and tries to appear original. First of all, we must congratulate those involved. I'm somewhat hard on Portuguese cinema, but I'm fully aware that, in our country, making cinema is almost an act of intellectual rebellion. And with “Alice”, Marco Martins made a good entry into the seventh art and won great praise at some international film festivals.

The strength and value of this film were solidly based on four qualities that are fair to praise: a good script premise, excellent cinematography, a good main actor and a quality original soundtrack. These are solid values and must be mentioned in any review or critical text about the film, but frankly, it seems not enough to qualify it as a good film. The Portuguese are good artists, they have a less detailed and poetic spirit, but they are terrible storytellers and this perhaps has a certain responsibility in the way in which, in cinema, there is a predominance of technical art and photography over the story told. It's something I will never accept because I see cinema in a diametrically opposite way, as a way of telling a good story.

Nuno Lopes courageously assures the main character. The actor is famous among the Portuguese thanks to an enviable career on television, but he also had a good career in theater and cinema, and is...