Reviews (105)

you can always just close your eyes and listen to the music
Ludwig van Beethoven has died and bequeathed his estate to an unnamed woman. This is the tantalising premise for director Bernard Rose's film, and for it's first half it's compelling and beautifully made. Then Rose blows it, with a red herring about Beethoven's adoption of his brother's son, and though we do eventually return to the search, this misguided structure loses the audience. Fortunately, Rose floods the soundtrack with that glorious music. Rose coached a magnificent performance out of Virginia Madsen in Candyman, and does the same thing here for Valeria Golino, Isabella Rosellini, and to a lesser degree, Johanna Ter Steege. These women's eyes and skin and voices are shockingly intimate. As Beethoven, Gary Oldman looks right but is all externals. He bases his performance on the composer's deafness, turning him into a tormented neurotic which undermines Rose's romantic conceit (though isn't it always the miserable ones who creates things of great beauty?). Rose has eerie fun with acoustics, giving us Ludwig's distorted perspective, although he lacks the tabloid sensibility to match Ken Russell's flamboyant bio's. Russell too supported the exclusively autobiographical notion of an artist's work and Rose even makes the deafness Freudian. The stunning opening scene with crowds grasping for the coffin is evidence of Beethoven as pop star.

Simply Brilliant
Gary Oldman gives a tour de force performance as Ludwig Van Beethoven. The story centers around the search of the "Immortal Beloved". There were three letters Ludwig wrote, yet not mailed, that put his heart down on paper. Who was she? There is your search.

To see Ludwig place his head on the piano to hear the notes of "Adagio Sostenuto" or "Moonlight Serenade" is beyond beautiful. Bearing in mind that Ludwig can't hear, he has to "feel" the vibrations emanting from the piano. Gary Oldman simply at his his finest, as he is really playing Beethoven!

I have seen Amadeus, and it ranks as of my all time faves.....but to see the maestro Beethoven suffer, and be glorified thru his music is as close to perfection as one can ask.

I can only ask. If you were given a GREAT gift like Beethoven was....yet could not hear the notes you were composing......how would you react? After watching Gary Oldman, I can envision the great maestro himself nodding in agreement.

If you don't see this movie, you are denying one of the greatest performances by an all star cast. See this movie, see Ludwig as he was, and see the women who loved him through his difficulties.

Great actor, awful plot.
Honesetly speaking, I love this film only because I am a great fan of Gary Oldman. His performance is powerful and adorable, and you will be helplessly fallen in love with HIS Beethoven. Yet, back to the movie and the plot...

Hm. You have to admit, you just don't know why people would like to romanticise historical figure and make a great artist to be a character in those soap opera. Hm. No offense but this movie, to a certain extent, make things so superficial. The psychological twist of Beethoven's immortal beloved is omitted- everything was then become so awkward, and I can't help wondering whether or not shall I continue the movie~

Just watch the performance of Gary, and forget everything about the plot. Sigh.

This movie is about something but not Beethoven
I never thought I would see a topless woman in a film about a classical music composer, but there she was in "Immortal Beloved", with her assets clearly on display while a Beethoven piano concerto sounded over the visual scene. This, I think, sums up my opinion about this film: it is more pornography than art, more about the director's vision than about Beethoven, who did indeed have an "immortal beloved".

It's not just the porn that defeats this movie. The history portrayed in this film is nonsense. Virtually nothing is correct. Gary Oldham is an actor with little range whose career has been constructed around a number of poor, cheesy films, of which this is one. He was a terrible choice to play Beethoven, who was 5-foot 5-inches tall, had a fiery, miserable disposition, and was a misanthrope. Oldham, who is 6-feet tall, played the Titan like he was Franz Lizst, a playboy from 1850. For the record, by 1850 Beethoven had been dead 23 years!

There is one scene in this film, at the end, where Oldham -- playing the young Beethoven -- falls in a pond and the camera scans upward toward the heavens as Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto is being played. This is the one fulfilling moment in this otherwise incredibly poor film. I remember the production values being fine, so it deserves a star for that.

I heard a lot of complaining about Ken Russell's movie about Tchaikovsky, "The Music Lovers", but at least there Russell got the music right and included it in the movie with scintillating scenes of the 1st Piano Concerto and Swan Lake ballet. This one doesn't even give the viewer the benefit of a music video by Ludwig van. Pity that, for it would have given us a reason to watch. As it is, anyone that wants to know anything about Beethoven should avoid this abomination.

This is not Beethoven....
Beethoven is one of my favorite composers. I took an extensive Music Course dedicated to this fantastic composer. As much as I like Gary Oldman's acting, I could barely watch this film. This is not his life, this woman was not his love, this is NOT Beethoven. Watch Amadeus if you want to see a great film about a great composer. Another reviewer wrote that Beethoven deserves the same treatment as Mozart got in Amadeus. He absolutely does. He was a tremendous man, complex and misunderstood, but beloved by the ALL of Europe by the time of his death. His memory still awaits a film dedicated to his real life and tumultuous, brilliant, disturbed life.
Better spend your time watching something else. ... Read more

Reviews (100)

Refreshing, different, and most importantly, original.
Forget the sequels, the Scream movies, and the 'I Know Who You Killed After Sleeping With Them Last Independance Day'-type movies. 'Candyman', the original urban-legend-based horror movie is definitely one of the absolute best horror movies of the 90's, and even today, with a decent body of work being produced in this genre, stands the test of time as a truly scary and original picture.

Attractive, intelligent and wry university researcher Helen Lyle (an excellent, hitherto overlooked Virginia Madsen) stumbles onto the horrifying legacy of The Candyman, while compiling a research paper on Urban Legend. She and her friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) investigate further, and what ensues is a genuinely disturbing movie, choc-full of decent performances, excellent direction and an exquisite score by Phillip Glass.

The premise is simple: Urban Legend comes to life, starts rampage, must be stopped. It's the actors that make 'Candyman' a treat, and Madsen and Lemmons give great performances, believable as disaster-plagued Women-Of-The-Ninties. Madsen, in particular, does a brilliant job in the role of the hapless Helen, being by turns businesslike and frail. Tony Todd as the titular Candyman is one of the most memorable villains of modern Horror, and gives a sensual, menacing performance as the Villain. His voice and screen presence make the flesh crawl, while simultaneously exuding charisma.

Bernard Rose's direction (he also wrote the screenplay, from an old Clive Barker story) is standard-setting. The grim, gritty vistas of Cabrini Green and the sepia-toned flashback sequences are memorable and chilling, and spiralling arial shots coupled with choppy cut-sequences make for a visual feast. The score, too, helps the picture enormously, and Glass' solo piano is the stuff of horror classics.

An original and excellent horror, 'Candyman' deserves its place as a true classic of the Genre. Neither pretentious nor ironic, it's a brilliantly realised vision of a modern nightmare. Get it.

The REAL Urban Legend film
Candyman is yet another fantastic adaptation of one of Clive Barker's stories into a film. It has a very different feeling to it compared to Hellraiser, Nightbreed, or Lord of Illusion. The world in "Candyman" feels more real, which makes it more frightening. The story is about a graduate student working on a thesis about urban legends and modern folklore that people use to deal with the baser human fears in modern life. Once the legends get spread they eventually take on a life of their own. In the case of Candyman, a legend taking on it's own life gets on an entirely new meaning.

That's enough to get you started without giving away too much.

In the right atmosphere, this movie can be down right frightening. The use of sound in the film is phenomenal. The constant switch between silence and Philip Glass' creepy score is wonderful. On top of that, Tony Todd's resonating deep voice will send chills down your spine when he calls out Helen's name.

The movie is starts very slow paced in order to keep the suspense up, and then explodes.
This is an intense, highly psychological, and gory film.

Been waiting to see this one but...
I love horror movies and this was one of the few that I haven't seen. The acting was okay, but the pacing was slow and it really didn't live up to the hype at all. Rent it first as I did.

Best Horror Movie
This by far has to be the scariest horror movie of all times. As a child i have to say the Friday the 13th movies were scary, along wit Mike Myers, Chucky, Freddy, and the rest but this movie goes beyond all that. I think if u want to see a good horror movie on a Friday night then this is the one. You will definitely be scared. The only thing is that you shouldnt watch it alot of times, the more u watch, the less scarier it becomes.. a must movie to own.

An overlooked psychological thriller
Candyman starts out pedestrian enough. Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) is a graduate student attempting to wow her instructor while dealing with her cheating professor husband. Helen chooses the local urban legend Candyman to blow her teacher away. Being the detailed and dedicated researcher, she investigates the area where most of Candyman's victims are found; the Cabrini Green housing project. Helen and her fellow student interview residents of the rundown apartment complex, explore an abandoned apartment that has been transformed into a shrine to the title character, and form an unusual bond with a young, struggling mother (Vanessa Williams).

All proceeds as one would expect until a murderer using the Candyman legend as a cover is caught by the police. Helen comforts a boy by telling him that the Candyman is not the boogeyman, just a bad man trying to scare and cause harm. This is the turning point of the movie.

By destroying the boy's belief in Candyman, Helen invites the entity who describes his state as "to be but not to exist". Candyman is because others believe in him. Helen has destroyed this so he must now revive his legend and resuscitate belief in him. Helen encounters him in a parking garage where he commands her to "be my victim". The next thing she knows, she is lying in the young mother's apartment next to her dead dog with a bloody knife in her hand.

From this point Helen descends into madness with murders and a kidnapping surrounding her while her husband's cheating ways are revealed. Eventually Candyman asks Helen to join her in the non-existence of legend. To save a child, Helen agrees and sacrifices her life so the child might live. The worst thing about the movie is a rather cheesy ending that confirms Helen's entry into Urban Legend-hood.

Candyman is a well written thriller. It's overabundance of gore overshadows the existential elements. All the actors perform their parts with aplomb. Virginia Madsen is more than believable as a woman on the edge of a breakdown, while Tony Todd was born to play the Candyman. His tall and imposing stature combined with a deep and creepy voice can be truly unnerving at times. Forgive the ending and you have a great horror film. ... Read more

Amazon.com

Based on a story by Clive Barker and skillfully written and directed by Bernard Rose, Candyman rises above most horror films by eerily suggesting that some urban legends--in this case a particularly frightening one--have a spooky basis in reality. The legend of the Candyman is a potent one around the high-rise tenements of Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing complex, where the residents speak of a dark, ominous figure who appears when his victims say his name five times in front of a mirror, then mercilessly slashes them to death. Upon learning that the Candyman is rumored to live in one of the vacant tenements, a University of Illinois researcher (Virginia Madsen) investigates a recent murder at Cabrini-Green. She learns that the Candyman (played by Tony Todd) is both unreal and chillingly real--a supernatural force of evil empowered by those who believe in his legend. He is a killer made flesh by the belief of others, and the young researcher's investigation is a threat to his existence. What happens next? We wouldn't dare spoil the chills, but rest assured that writer-director Rose has tapped into a wellspring of urban angst and fear, and Candyman serves up its gruesome frights with a refreshing dose of intelligence. --Jeff Shannon ... Read more

Reviews (100)

Refreshing, different, and most importantly, original.
Forget the sequels, the Scream movies, and the 'I Know Who You Killed After Sleeping With Them Last Independance Day'-type movies. 'Candyman', the original urban-legend-based horror movie is definitely one of the absolute best horror movies of the 90's, and even today, with a decent body of work being produced in this genre, stands the test of time as a truly scary and original picture.

Attractive, intelligent and wry university researcher Helen Lyle (an excellent, hitherto overlooked Virginia Madsen) stumbles onto the horrifying legacy of The Candyman, while compiling a research paper on Urban Legend. She and her friend Bernadette (Kasi Lemmons) investigate further, and what ensues is a genuinely disturbing movie, choc-full of decent performances, excellent direction and an exquisite score by Phillip Glass.

The premise is simple: Urban Legend comes to life, starts rampage, must be stopped. It's the actors that make 'Candyman' a treat, and Madsen and Lemmons give great performances, believable as disaster-plagued Women-Of-The-Ninties. Madsen, in particular, does a brilliant job in the role of the hapless Helen, being by turns businesslike and frail. Tony Todd as the titular Candyman is one of the most memorable villains of modern Horror, and gives a sensual, menacing performance as the Villain. His voice and screen presence make the flesh crawl, while simultaneously exuding charisma.

Bernard Rose's direction (he also wrote the screenplay, from an old Clive Barker story) is standard-setting. The grim, gritty vistas of Cabrini Green and the sepia-toned flashback sequences are memorable and chilling, and spiralling arial shots coupled with choppy cut-sequences make for a visual feast. The score, too, helps the picture enormously, and Glass' solo piano is the stuff of horror classics.

An original and excellent horror, 'Candyman' deserves its place as a true classic of the Genre. Neither pretentious nor ironic, it's a brilliantly realised vision of a modern nightmare. Get it.

The REAL Urban Legend film
Candyman is yet another fantastic adaptation of one of Clive Barker's stories into a film. It has a very different feeling to it compared to Hellraiser, Nightbreed, or Lord of Illusion. The world in "Candyman" feels more real, which makes it more frightening. The story is about a graduate student working on a thesis about urban legends and modern folklore that people use to deal with the baser human fears in modern life. Once the legends get spread they eventually take on a life of their own. In the case of Candyman, a legend taking on it's own life gets on an entirely new meaning.

That's enough to get you started without giving away too much.

In the right atmosphere, this movie can be down right frightening. The use of sound in the film is phenomenal. The constant switch between silence and Philip Glass' creepy score is wonderful. On top of that, Tony Todd's resonating deep voice will send chills down your spine when he calls out Helen's name.

The movie is starts very slow paced in order to keep the suspense up, and then explodes.
This is an intense, highly psychological, and gory film.

Been waiting to see this one but...
I love horror movies and this was one of the few that I haven't seen. The acting was okay, but the pacing was slow and it really didn't live up to the hype at all. Rent it first as I did.

Best Horror Movie
This by far has to be the scariest horror movie of all times. As a child i have to say the Friday the 13th movies were scary, along wit Mike Myers, Chucky, Freddy, and the rest but this movie goes beyond all that. I think if u want to see a good horror movie on a Friday night then this is the one. You will definitely be scared. The only thing is that you shouldnt watch it alot of times, the more u watch, the less scarier it becomes.. a must movie to own.

An overlooked psychological thriller
Candyman starts out pedestrian enough. Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) is a graduate student attempting to wow her instructor while dealing with her cheating professor husband. Helen chooses the local urban legend Candyman to blow her teacher away. Being the detailed and dedicated researcher, she investigates the area where most of Candyman's victims are found; the Cabrini Green housing project. Helen and her fellow student interview residents of the rundown apartment complex, explore an abandoned apartment that has been transformed into a shrine to the title character, and form an unusual bond with a young, struggling mother (Vanessa Williams).

All proceeds as one would expect until a murderer using the Candyman legend as a cover is caught by the police. Helen comforts a boy by telling him that the Candyman is not the boogeyman, just a bad man trying to scare and cause harm. This is the turning point of the movie.

By destroying the boy's belief in Candyman, Helen invites the entity who describes his state as "to be but not to exist". Candyman is because others believe in him. Helen has destroyed this so he must now revive his legend and resuscitate belief in him. Helen encounters him in a parking garage where he commands her to "be my victim". The next thing she knows, she is lying in the young mother's apartment next to her dead dog with a bloody knife in her hand.

From this point Helen descends into madness with murders and a kidnapping surrounding her while her husband's cheating ways are revealed. Eventually Candyman asks Helen to join her in the non-existence of legend. To save a child, Helen agrees and sacrifices her life so the child might live. The worst thing about the movie is a rather cheesy ending that confirms Helen's entry into Urban Legend-hood.

Candyman is a well written thriller. It's overabundance of gore overshadows the existential elements. All the actors perform their parts with aplomb. Virginia Madsen is more than believable as a woman on the edge of a breakdown, while Tony Todd was born to play the Candyman. His tall and imposing stature combined with a deep and creepy voice can be truly unnerving at times. Forgive the ending and you have a great horror film. ... Read more

Description

Kiefer Sutherland (Flatliners, Young Guns) is Chicago Joe, a World War II American serviceman.Emily Lloyd (In Country) is Georgina, an aspiring showgirl.When they meet, passion and desire fuel a dangerous fantasy.He is the big-time gangster, she is the glamorous moll.They go for a reckless drive.They steal a fur coat.Each time she dares him to take a wilder risk, and each time he proves himself.Until their lust for excitement demands nothing short of going "all the way" - to murder.CHICAGO JOE AND THE SHOWGIRL is the shocking true story of two strangers who meet, mingle and lock into a dangerous world of their own. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

VERY UNUSUAL
AN UNUSUAL FILM WHICH VACILLATES BETWEEN FANTASY AND REALITY. I DIDN'T KNOW IF THE FILM STORY WAS REALLY TRUE OR NOT (EVEN THOUGH THE OPENING SAYS IT IS) UNTIL THE LAST SEGMENTS OF THE PICTURE.

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY KIEFER SUTHERLAND ... Read more