Stars: Danny Glover, Sandra Oh, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Alice Braga, Gael Garcia Bernal

Director: Fernando Meirelles

Summary: Fernando Meirelles (CITY OF GOD, THE CONSTANT GARDENER) directs this adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago's novel. An unexplained epidemic of blindness strikes an unknown city, and the stricken are forced to depend on each other and the single sighted person in their midst.

Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (CITY OF GOD) brings Jose Saramago's much-loved novel BLINDNESS to the screen with this ambitious adaptation. Like Saramago's book, Meirelles chooses to forfeit names for his characters, instead spinning BLINDNESS around the plight of a doctor and his wife (respectively played by Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore). A blindness epidemic strikes an unnamed city, forcing the government to put many citizens in quarantine, including Ruffalo's doctor. Unable to conceive of life without him, Moore's character feigns blindness and joins him in the grimy high-security institution where visually impaired citizens are kept. Their attempt to survive in the rotting facility, which quickly falls into disrepair and chaos, forms the backbone of Meirelles's movie. There's a twist in the tale as Ruffalo and Moore's characters struggle to lead the blind to a place where they can come to terms with their condition, and Meirelles makes the journey deeply unsettling. An impressive cast ably backs Ruffalo and Moore, including Danny Glover, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Alice Braga. Their performances give a palpable feeling of what it's like to be blind, and even provide a few moments of dark comedy as they stumble through the institution in which they're imprisoned. Meirelles's movie, which essentially functions as an allegory for societal collapse, is an alarming and often distressing look at the dark side of human nature. The director often saturates the film with milky white colour, reflecting the bright light the blind see when the condition besets them. This glare often makes it difficult to look at the screen, inflicting Meirelles's audience with a feeling of momentary blindness. An atmosphere of tangible dread manifests itself as BLINDNESS progresses, and the ugly scenes of rape and brawling, largely caused by the meagre food rationing among the blind, makes for emotional viewing.

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This 1943 version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was made just two years after Citizen Kane, and it certainly looks like star Orson Welles muscled his way behind the camera much of the time. (In fact, co-star Joan Fontaine--who plays the title character--has maintained that Welles methodically did just that every day on the set.) Not that the film's official director was a hack: Robert Stevenson gets the credit, a man who later had a busy career at Disney making numerous live-action hits such as Mary Poppins. But there's no mistaking Welles' masterful hand in this film's bold and creative look, and there's no getting away from his enigmatic charisma as Rochester, the widower who takes in Jane as a governess to his daughter. An engrossing, gorgeous film, there's even a small role for Elizabeth Taylor at the beginning as Jane's unlucky, doomed friend at a cruel boarding school. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

Aspect Ratio:	16:9 Anamorphic Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Deleted scenes, Making-of, Audio commentary
Year:	2008
Release Date:	March 30, 2009
Runtime:	117 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	P 925101000
Keywords:	English, General, Drama, Blindness
Genre:	Drama