Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

This film is an excellent (though necessarily slightly different) version of Thomas Mann's novella of the same name. Its effect was so powerful that it drew me to the Venice Lido to stay at the Hotel des Bains, where both film and book are set, and even since that hotel closed, I go back regularly. To me it's about the impossibility of obtaining one's heart's desire, and to read ignorant reviews from 17 year olds makes me cringe To them I say" No, it isn't a film version of a video game..what made you think it would be?" Come back and rewatch it when you're grown up, if that ever happens.

This is a movie about a man fantasizing about a young boy. Nothing more, though woven around sights of one of the most romantic cities in the world. I see no redeeming value in this semi-autobiographical story by Thomas Mann. I can't imagine there was any other reason to write/film it than to increase sympathy for men with these feelings. Pure propaganda, unadorned by any exploration of internal thought process, which might have served to explain his (seeming) struggle. If you want to see an entertaining movie about homosexuals, check out Capote. This is simply about a mans fascination with a good-looking youth. Risking people thinking I'm being homophobic, I just can't understand the rave reviews, or even the good reviews that ignore the central tenet of the movie. I should say only tenet - there's utterly no plot and little dialog. I'd be more upset if the movie wasn't so awful boring. Btw - the 3 stars were entirely due to the shots of Venice!

In this adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel, avant-garde composer Gustave Aschenbach (loosely based on Gustav Mahler) travels to a Venetian seaside resort in search of repose after a period of artistic and personal stress. But he finds no peace there, for he soon develops a troubling attraction to an adolescent boy, Tadzio, on vacation with his family.What strikes me about this film is the odd coloration. Some have said it makes the film look like a moving painting. I can see that, but I also think it looks muted. A step up from Technicolor, but a far cry from other methods. I wish I knew more about cinematography so I could express the thought more clearly.There is a bit of a scandalous subplot, as it suggests pedophilia or something similar. Strange how many films (or books) have heroes (or protagonists) afflicted with this. What are we to make of them? Are they evil or just flawed? The cholera epidemic plays a major part in the story, and it is interesting that the film seems to be known less for that than the "romance" angle. Not many films have cholera in them, which seems odd considering its deadliness. Everyone in old movies seems to die from tuberculosis!

In DIV, Visconti overstates the Mahlerishness of Aschenbach to the point of confusion, and worse, does the same to the 'boy-ogler' interpretation of Aschenbach to the point of insult. The result ends up feeling like an horrific parody - or even fictional bio - of the great composer / conductor.Mann, upon whose work the film is apparently based, much admired Mahler, and, learning of his death, gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name and (apparently), his appearance - but unlike Visconti, Mann cast him as a writer, not a composer. Mann's written work was already mostly finalised when these 'honours' were bestowed at any rate. But more importantly, Mann is widely thought to have drawn from a number of different sources for his main character; different traits from different people, and to specific ends. In short, the clumsiness of the film's choice of visuals, seems to lecherise Mahler himself through a 'little boy obsessed' Aschenbach, and insinuate something of Mahler himself which has no real basis. The overplayed likeness left the feeling that what was going on was really nothing to do with the novella, but instead a 'secret revealed' about Mahler. And so the story lost all philosophical meaning immediately, and became something more like slander or gossip, leaving the perhaps less studied Mahler-appreciating audience to be misled into supposing all sorts of things - even trying to extrapolate something of the historical relationship between Mahler and Schonberg (as if Mahler's helping of Schonberg required any more motivation than memories of his aspiring composer / musician younger brother, Otto!)But aside from this terrific complaint which I might at least be able to (unreasonably!) write off to misinterpretation, the film's slow broody stillness - and labored sincerity - cannot reach a shadow of the way to the effortlessly profound music which it misappropriated. Way back in the day (July 19, 1971), Alan Rich did a great review of this movie in the New York Magazine. "...the insult to Mahler doesn't like in any imputation about homosexuality, not even in the way this element is luridly underlined in the movie. It lies, rather, in the cheap, uncomprehending niggle-naggle about the arts that Visconti puts into the mouths of Aschenbach-Mahler and Alfred [-Schonberg]..."It's easy enough to find on googlebooks. That review pretty much says it all - other than one more comment which desperately need to be made, and that being, that the film's lack of subtlety pushed it Aschenbach firmly into 'little boy ogler' territory, which was simply creepy, but which also obliterated much of the intelligent introspection and 'longing for the lost days of youth' that the film might have otherwise evoked. Someone likes it I guess. Not me. Tacky. Slow. Self-serious. Overblown. Self-important. Failed art- house bordering on mockumentry bordering on defamation.