Gripping story with well-crafted characters

disgusting, overrated, pointless

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Silly and slightly scary, Méliès's somewhat minor one minute short 'A Nightmare' fits perfectly in with the rest of his filmography. It's a trick film, a comedy, a fantasy, a portrayal of a dream, and something of a horror film, if not in any conventional sense, all of which are genres/styles of film that Méliès so often loved to explore. The strange giant head that appears somewhere around the middle of this minute is simultaneously amusing and successfully creepy (and remains so to this day), add to that a cast of characters that includes an energetically dancing and mischievous clown and you have a film that gives off an atmosphere dominated by both humour and uneasiness.

I really like this one. Once again, the poor bearded man tries to get some shuteye. Unfortunately, he has a series of visions (dreams). The first is pleasant, a pretty young woman; but when he tries to embrace her, she turns into a black man with a banjo. That guy transforms into a clown, and finally a big dominating face. The pacing is very good and the thing is genuinely funny.

It only runs for one minute, but this film is among Mélieès' most interesting works. We see a man who has a nightmare, which starts quite nice though as he dreams of a beautiful woman clad in a toga with curly black hair. The moment he wants to hug her, however, she transforms into a male banjo player and afterward into another man. As they finally disappeared the moon outside becomes huge and pretty scary, looks like the one from Méliès possibly most famous film. Finally the three dream creatures appear again and right afterward the dreamer wakes up, checks if there something under his pillow that was responsible for this nightmare and then goes back to sleep. Lots of action for just 60 seconds I know. Quite entertaining short film that may be a good choice to start with when you want to get into the age of silent movies.

An early dream from the first minutes of cinema. We might as well be looking at some of the first images not just captured from reality, but really dreamed up with light. Now it seems modest, naive, primitive, but what outlandish phantasmagoria it must have been at the time; how modern, vibrant, strange, new, dangerous, exhilarating to see this with 1896 eyes. Imagine. The 19th century.A man is sleeping at his bed. A woman appears, he reaches out to touch her and she turns into a minstrel, into a giant moon - an emblematic Melies motif - into a dancing troupe at his balcony. By now, we have devised many different ways of both issuing these visions and shifting them within the context of a story, many devices to dream. Watching this, you get the picture that it goes back much further, further back into magic lantern shows and cameras obscura. The point? To bring internal worlds to life, and has not changed 100 years later.