Did you people see the same film I saw?

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

I have watched the 5 nominated movies for Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and this movie Really was THE WORST of them and one of the worst movies I have ever watched, I wonder surprisingly why it won Oscar

I was excited to watch the Best Foreign Film Oscar winner of this year. Being in the company of such transcendental movies in past winners, I was sure that "A Fantastic Woman" was going to be up to the challenge. What a disappointment it has been to watch this movie. This type of story has been told successfully in so many other movies in the past, that I don´t really understand why this particular one was even nominated for an Oscar; what a rip off for the other nominees. Other than the character being a transgender woman, this movie does not portray anything new that a lover who is rejected by her partner's family has experienced in so many past stories. The only thing clear in the movie is that Chile is a country living in the 12th century. The pace of the storytelling is slow, the script is at times completely unbelievable, and the story keeps trying to surprise us but at the end nothing important happens; every reaction is completely predictable. The last scene is the best the movie has to offer, where the main character shows that there is life after death. I want my time back. I do not recommend this movie unless you belong to the transgender community.

Calling "A Fantastic Woman" queer cinema or a trans film would be to completely misread it. In fact, the word "trans" never makes an appearance. Sebastian Lelio, part of the vanguard of modern Chilean cinema, digs so much deeper into his protagonist than her gender. Although Marina's (Daniela Vega) trans identity factors heavily into the film, it is not the focal point of her story, who she is, or the driver of the plot, something modern films with LGBTQ characters have yet to get right - until now."A Fantastic Woman" is instead a film about a woman forced to grieve in isolation because others refuse to accept her. When her lover (Francisco Reyes) dies suddenly, Marina finds herself shut out by his family and put under a microscope by just about everyone. Lelio works diligently with Vega, whom he sort of thrust into the role, to create this portrait of brooding loneliness and communicate the extent to which this loss and its reverberations have shaken Marina's confidence in all facets of her identity.Capturing internal conflict rather than manufacturing external antagonism appears to be Lelio's storytelling preference. He and co-writer Gonzalo Maza do give us some tangible plot and conflict, but "A Fantastic Woman" is mostly the story of Marina's emotions, specifically her grief. The script is extremely light on context, even surrounding Marina and who she is and - more to the viewer's natural curiosity - who she was before the start of the film's timeline. That choice keeps us at a certain distance from Marina, keeping us as objective observers to her circumstances rather than evoking our extreme pity.The average viewer will want desperately for the film to address Marina's gender identity directly; Lelio makes it a point to talk around it, forcing us to come to terms with our own grotesque curiosity. Nothing about Marina's past or, more bluntly, her genitalia, are truly necessary to her human experience of needing to mourn and having no outlet and no one to comfort her.To illustrate Marina's inner conflict and her search for meaning and closure, Lelio plays with brief spurts of fantastical daydreams and haunting visions. They are these tiny digressions that embody familiar emotions and create an intimacy with her character that many filmmakers would use words or dialogue to try and convey. That's what makes Lelio such a promising emerging voice in film, albeit one who might struggle for some time to completely latch on to mainstream tastes."A Fantastic Woman" has a lesson to teach all movie fans about what really matters in good storytelling. What a film seems to be about based on background, context and plot means little; a good storyteller drills into and unearths the universally human ideas and truths that are at the heart of any story worth telling. Lelio illustrates those ideas in this film with great beauty and the utmost sensitivity.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

This film won the 2018 Oscar for best foreign language film, and deservedly so, carried confidently on the shoulders of Daniela Vega, playing the title role of Marina Vidal. Marina's world falls apart when her relatively recent, much older lover unexpectedly dies, and she faces the bigotry, prejudice and appalling behaviour from the deceased lover's family, police, health authorities and just about everyone else. The reason is her transgender status, prompting a range of reactions from blatant bigotry to intrusive curiosity.The film isn't easy viewing, but the steely, determined calm with which Marina faces her almost overwhelming range of opponents is little short of amazing. It tells an important story well, and deserves wide audience support to reinforce the generally high critical acclaim.