Boring

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Beautifully rendered and splendidly unique. There is almost no way to fully describe it; but THE LAST CIRCUS is a love it or hate it movie. I loved it.The performances are top notch; the script is sharp; every scene is unpredictable, the way a high wire trapeze act is.Perhaps I'm generalizing too much, but I don't want to add even a specter of a spoiler. I grabs you from the first frame and never lets go. The director never tinkers with emotions, he plays them out grandly with a magnificent cast - like a juggler or a knife thrower. The circus itself is a perfect metaphor.Buy it see it, but with this caveat - the film is grotesque and quite gory, but not for exploitation. You're not being snookered. Buckle up for one of the greatest shows on earth.

The moment I saw the trailer for The Last Circus, I fell in love. The bizarre, yet sublime, imagery, the engaging story, the intense music. The Last Circus looked like a hit! However, when some mediocre reviews came in I lowered my expectation slightly, but after seeing it, I needn't have bothered! The Last Circus astonished me at how good it was! I was left in amazement at seeing such a strange, beautiful, funny, sad, tragic and gripping gem. The Last Circus deserves to be a cult classic, for it will certainly not be to everyone's tastes, but it is certainly is to my tastes!The sublime opening sets the tone for the rest of the film. Children laugh as all the institutional information pops up, and then we realise that they're laughing at the clowns in the circus. This laughter is suddenly cut rather short however, when an army man comes in (because it's the civil war) declaring all the circus members to fight! Then some wonderfully weird titles come up with seemingly random images of the Spanish civil war, Universal monsters and other random film clippings including Cannibal Holocaust. Its bizarre and unconventional, which is exactly what this film is! The engaging opening is then finished off with some fantastic imagery of a clown dressed up as a woman, carrying a machete and slicing up the opposition! It's a fantastic surreal image and one you're not likely to forget.After this great back-story has finished, we're introduced to our hero (or anti-hero). The sad clown. A great shot introduces us to all the weird and wonderful characters and it's often hilarious. We've got an elephant who gets jealous when her owner talks to another woman, we've got two old bickering dog trainers and the list goes on. It's a funny sequence and also a great way to get us introduced to all the characters, all of which are brilliant creations. But obviously the sad clown falls for the beautiful trapeze artist, who belongs to the happy clown. The happy clown is a seriously nasty piece of work. The first time we see him, he's tossing dwarfs out the door! It's this rivalry that drives the film forward. However, as the film goes on the line between good and evil begins to blur.I don't want to say any more on the story because it would be a shame to spoil it. The great thing about the Last Circus is that it tells a story. It's a story I loved, and obviously one which the film-makers cared about because it's told so well. The characters are fantastic, with people you can care about, and others you can't. You'll root for the tragic sad clown, who is the only one who has the guts to stand up to the bullying happy clown, but things later take an unpredictable turn. The Last Circus is a love story at heart, and the poor person in-between this bitter feud is the innocent Nathalia, the trapeze artist who you can't help but feel sorry for as she drives two clowns absolutely wild!The Last Circus never stops looking amazing. Sometimes it looks more like an art piece than a film, especially when crazy imagery comes into play such as a clown machine-gunning a restaurant! The grand finale is surprisingly cinematic and quite a spectacle to behold. The Last Circus also never forgets its entertainment-value as horror fans are given some gloriously entertaining blood-shed, without it ever forgetting its story and characters at heart. The Last Circus has a big heart, and quite an emotional ending that left me in surprise.Another great thing about The Last Circus is the pace. The pacing is sometimes break-neck, and the story motors along, trying not to waste a single frame. Sometimes I felt that it moved too quickly, and it would've been nice to soak some of it in. I also thought that the sad clown's descent into madness was too quick and unconvincing, however let's not forget that we're watching a film about two warring clowns! The Last Circus is not trying to be normal! The gripping narrative all culminates into an all-action finale that's pretty intense. The spectacular directing goes up another notch, and the fairytale soon comes to an end we all were hoping to see, and one that's actually very sad.The Last Circus was even better than I thought it was going to be. From the trailer, I expected a bit of a mess (a beautiful mess nonetheless) however what I got was a focused story, with fantastic characters, spectacular directing and a tight screenplay. The Last Circus really is amazing to behold and unlike anything I've ever seen (and I've seen Taxidermia!) It's severely underrated and reminded me of The Prestige with clowns. So if you're after some surreal imagery, a gripping narrative, some intense directing and characters you can actually care about, then roll up, roll up for The Last Circus! No children allowed!

If you have seen any film by Alex de la Ingelsia, then you know that no two of his films are alike, that they contain a lot of humor and arresting images, and often a lot of graphic gores, and are the product of a very original mind. THE LAST CIRCUS is no exception. There are images in this film that will stay with you for years. The settings are many and varied, beginning with the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and winding up in 1973 on a War Monument that includes a giant cross and statues for an ending that will bring to mind Hitchcock's NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Along the way there is a nightclub dedicated to Telly Savalas called Kojak!Pedro Rodríguez has created two very different special effects makeups, one of a man who has self-mutilated his face with acid and a hot iron, and another by man who has had his face slashed with a grappling hook and then stitched back together by a veterinarian. Rodríguez is someone whose future work bears watching.The setting for much of the action is a traveling circus reminiscent of FREAKS crossed with Alejandro Jodorowsky's SANTA SANGRE. Clowns have always been pretty creepy anyway, but you will never look at them the same after this film.

"Balada triste de trompeta" (Sad trumpet ballad, in Spanish -I have no idea why they translated it as "The last circus", as it's much poorer) is none short of a masterpiece, in my opinion. It is also a 100% Spanish film, meaning it is a tragicomedy, a totally Spanish genre and it also expands between two crucial moments of Spain's recent history, full of tragic events -the Civil War, the killings, Franco's repression and dictatorship- but also full of grotesque details, situations and characters that were real and now, in retrospect, feel utterly ridiculous, much more so than they were at the time -e.g. when the dictator went hunting, they really prepared the prey for him so that he would look as a great hunter- or are just seen as a byproduct of the times that Spain had to live. Director Alex de la Iglesia also cares to sprinkle the movie with historical events that are apparently disconnected to the main story -like the assassination of Franco's hard man and presumed heir as the new tyrant, admiral Carrero Blanco- but which I believe serve a function to the main metaphor that this movie is.The movie starts in 1937, in the heat of the Spanish Civil War. A clown is recruited by force to fight with the Republican side, and manages to slaughter quite a lot of Franco's men. His young son, Javier, is traumatized by the whole event and later, in 1973, we meet him again as the new recruit in a circus, the Sad Clown. He can only be the sad clown because he is sad himself, and cannot make children laugh. They pair him up with the Funny Clown, a ruthless but charismatic man called Sergio, who turns out to be the partner to a beautiful trapeze artist, Natalia. Javi falls in love with Natalia and thus starts a rivalry between the two men for the love of a woman, with unforeseeable consequences.The narration is so filled with colorful characters, crazy comedy, crazy violence mixed with comedy or with surreal elements, historical references, and an underlying sense of tragicomedy, and it is so excessive and full of surprises, one can't help but keep watching, much as it is over the top in many an occasion. You can enjoy the movie at face value and ride the wave of the story for what it is, but you can also watch this movie as a summary and insight into the recent Spanish history and how Spain seems doomed to always be split in two, similar people, brothers, always rivalling and even hating each other, seemingly beyond reconciliation, connecting episodes of sheer senselessness and absurdity with spine-chilling episodes of hate and violence, and all of it boiling down to a tragedy that you can only laugh at because it makes no sense.I'm not surprised that Quentin Tarantino himself was so taken with this movie, and I wouldn't be surprised if an adaptation of this movie was made soon in an American context.