What makes it different from others?

Lack of good storyline.

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

What an amazing movie - so strange, so romantic, so beautiful, so different, so dreamy, so delicate, so imaginative. This is a film that should be seen if only because it is one of the most beautifully shot films of the last several years. Praised to the high heaven "Pan's Labyrinth" simply pales and disappears in comparison. The Brothers Quay are the visual masters with astounding talents for capturing dreams and transferring them to the screen in the most hypnotizing ways imaginable. We may not be able to always understand the meaning of a dream by trying to interpret its objects but it would not stop us from feeling the beauty and magic of the film. There is a story of course, a fairytale about an evil doctor who abducts a beautiful opera singer with a magnificent voice whom he wants to transform into a mechanical singing device and a piano tuner of earthquakes who falls in love with her and tries to save her but every image and every sound of the movie are the story themselves. Everyone who feels at home in the worlds of David Lynch or Peter Greenaway, Luis Bunuel or Jan Svankmajer, Guy Maddin or the Brothers Polish; who is impressed by Georges Franju's "Les Yeux sans visage", Jean Cocteau's "Belle et la bête" (1946), by both Patrick Susskind's and Tom Tykwer's "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer" (2006), and by dark romantic fairy tales of E.T. A. Hoffmann, should see and listen to "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes", the film which charm starts with its title. Excellent , and according to my own grading system, a visual and sound masterpiece, I wish I'd seen it in the theater

"The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" is a strange and wonderful dark fairy tale about a piano tuner sent to a mysterious island to assist a malevolent conductor who's keeping an opera singer captive; the conductor wants the tuner to fine tune and repair several large, mechanical, complex Joseph-Cornell like boxes. But the boxes are not what they seem… I agree with those who felt "Institute Benjamenta" (the brothers' first full-length film) was boring--it is--but The Brothers Quay have improved by leaps and bounds with this film. The narrative is significantly easier to follow & figure out than, say, "Mulholland Drive"; in fact, I'd even say it's more straightforward than executive producer Terry Gilliam's own "12 Monkeys" (for a start, it's linear). Everything said about the images is true; Nic Knowland's cinematography and the Quay Brothers' own production design is superb.So don't be put off by the reviews saying "Piano Tuner" doesn't make any sense; this is in fact a straightforward movie if you're paying close enough attention. Anyone who likes David Lynch, Gilliam, or Jeunet & Caro needs to see it. It's also one of the best films of the year.

Its a matter of abstraction. Always has been, in everything I suppose. But especially in film. The business is one of sharpening some edges and making others recede so as to cut us in some way. Its a dangerous business for all concerned and if it ever seems too competent, you know the blood is fake.The Quays, like Madden and Greenaway go into forbidden visual zones. They do let me down sometimes when I sense fear, but never when they stumble because stumbling is what shows the risk.These guys already have earned a place on my short list of films you really must see before you die. I only allow two in any year, so it is something that their incredibly short "Are We Still Married?" is there. But there it is, something that is so rich and open, yet haunting, it will change your dreams permanently.That short is entirely animated in their preferred style. They are Victorian in nature, both in the junk they assemble to create their worlds, but also in the cosmology they lean on. Its one where explicable means are all broken. Humanity escapes logic. Its the other side of the Holmes syndrome. Its where most of us live.That's that and this is this, something more ambitious, the long form. That means you must support the long arc, a stretch across the cosmology longer than we can retain in our short memory. What they've done is rely on something we've seen before: a man-god who captures life in a life within life fold. We are sometimes in and sometimes out. The "in" is one of seven "automata," complex mechanical devices that sing life.The tuner believes himself to be assisting in the maintenance of the machines from the outside but finds himself to be part of the mechanism. The existence of the machines allows the Quays to insert animated sequences that are supposed to merge with the live action. That live action is mostly dream space and when not, is a pseudodream world of Victorian frames and hues.Its all just too lovely and risky and dangerous to be denied a place in your soul. Sure, it comes dangerously close to the banal. Sure, you can see a few seams and we all wish the budget for the final "performance" was bigger. But if you allow yourself to be swept in this as you routinely do for other science fiction worlds, you will find a sort of psychic sexual release in some long sequences.In reading about this, some cite Svankmejer as an influence. You need to understand this. Svankmeyer is a Czech animator, a good one. He's an influence in just being there and surviving. But his world is organic and bleak. It is the stuff that comes from repeatedly beaten innocents. The Quays are more mechanical in their images, more episodic in the small. And leagues more optimistic. Their world is one where the sun shines, but just over the edge of a place in which we are stuck.It makes all the difference. One you would bring children to, in hopes that they would remain children in the edges and so make you wise. The Czech, no. That's where you go to die or try.I'm putting this as a four for the time being. It may be bumped. 2005 was a very bad year for film. But I haven't yet seen "Cache" or "History of Violence." Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

Every single appearance in this magical world pretends to have a meaning. Maybe it has, maybe not, that makes no difference. It's just a dependency, an intimate relation which chains you at the screen, forgiving you, still busy in wondering who and why... it embraces you in a cozy fake world, more real than any realistic projection. The discounted love story plot is just a background for the astonishing images and sounds, artificial and natural visions, insane but familiar feelings which make this hours pregnant. Erotism is driving the puppets (aka all of them, the characters) straight into their toy alcove, still standing on the edge of perversion and passion. You'll love these dropped confetti, if you're in a receptive state of mind.