Critic Reviews

A dazzling, studious exercise in found footage excavation and reconfiguration, laced with tongue in cheek.

Vacillating between a playful comedy and a brooding melodrama, it’s a wonderful example of how one can work within the confines of homage yet emerge with a unique work in its own right.

It’s not so much an assemblage as it is a conjuring. You don’t just watch these clips — you see through and between them. The juxtapositions create vital, cosmic connections.

They get at the essence of Vertigo, haunting us via ghostly transmissions.

Even working with some of the most mainstream ingredients one could possibly find (including, in a funny moment, an NSYNC video) and one of the most familiar settings on earth, Guy Maddin knows how to make things strange.

If this hour-long collage might fairly be summed up as little more than an inspired goof, of primary interest to cineastes, it’s nonetheless one whose giddy fun will hold up for such an audience through repeat viewings.

The Green Fog is part city symphony, part playful tribute; but primarily an example of pure, unadulterated cinematic delirium.

It is, in effect, a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures, a record of the social and architectural changes the city has endured over more than a century.

The Green Fog is a cinephile’s mash note — and a glimpse of the beautiful film library of Babel that lives in Guy Maddin’s head.

As a chronicle of how San Francisco has changed over the years — and as a salute to the city’s role as a back lot for masters like Erich von Stroheim and Howard Hawks — The Green Fog is a wonder of excavation and urban history. What it says about Hitchcock is more ambiguous.