Goya's Ghosts

There is so little emotionally or intellectually at stake in most popular entertainment that Goya's Ghosts, Milos Forman's challenging, compelling and wildly uneven film, shoots like a cannonball into the solar plexus. I can't remember when I've been so physically and mentally shattered.

Far from an embarrassment and a generally fine piece of work.

Although the period feeling is convincing, Forman doesn't seem to know exactly what he wants to say about this intensely complex era - and that leaves his cast floundering.

Whatever the faults of Goya's Ghosts -- and there are several -- you've got to hand it to director Milos Forman: It takes real chutzpah to cast Randy Quaid as the king of Spain.

Handsome but stilted.

If Forman is trying to communicate that art isn't an effective way to change American society, he's proved his point neatly with this muddled, wandering dud.

In a season of digital bombast, it can be a relief to walk into a stodgy life-of-the-great-man costume drama. Goya's Ghosts, before it turns into a messy, horse-drawn load, achieves a civilized stuffiness that gives off its own mild pleasure.

The premise is rich: the Inquisition, the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic invasion, and Goya as a troubled witness to it all. Yet the film jumps between historical episodes without building a consistent narrative spine. Just when it seems ready to dig deeper, it skips ahead as if entire chapters didn’t matter.Visually, it has strength. The production design is lush, the cinematography refined, and Stellan Skarsgård delivers a compelling presence. Ironically, though, Goya himself feels sidelined in his own **** screenplay struggles with tone and focus. One moment it carefully explains events; the next, it rushes past crucial developments in Spanish history. That uneven rhythm makes the film feel more like an ambitious melodrama than a fully realized historical ****’s not without merit. There are striking scenes and undeniable craft. But it ultimately feels like a missed opportunity — impressive in parts, disjointed as a whole.

Oh **** what I expected from Forman. This film was DULL. The acting was good, but there is so much an actor can do when the character they are given to play is not developed properly the characters were more like caricatures, very 2D. You really could not fell for any of them! No feelings of empathy for the tortured innocent, no sense of anger for the evil egomaniac who always gets away with it. Nothing. The only "feeling" you get from this film is from it's ending it's the felling of relief that the film is finally over