Rating: 
Summary: Would've NEVER bought this if considered less than 5 stars
Review: WIERD!! That one word will always attract me to a movie. This movie certainly attracted me. I guess you could say that it is future-Franco-neo-gothic.I absolutely hate the French, but I loved this movie! It was very bizzare, grotesque, fairy-book, & macabre. Although the movie was written by someone from Hollywood (as all movies are, and you know what I think about Hollywood, communist scum) and most likely has some leftist message to it, it still makes you think. Very few movies nowadays encourage anything resembling thought-provoking. Altogether, a jolly good movie. I like the English-dubbed version better, as I despise everything French. I also have BOOKS for reading, and DVD's/VHS for watching. If The City of Lost Children was a book first, please let me know.
Rating: 
Summary: A Two Handed Movie
Review: This is definitely a two handed movie. On the one hand, the relationship between One and Miette is beautifully wrought, the sets and art direction are fabulous, the evil Siamese twin sisters are deliciously over the top. (Judith Vittet in the role of Miette is especially noteworthy in that she plays a strong, forceful child without a touch of saccharine. Truly a great performance.) And there is one sequence in which the power of a single tear in a sympathetic universe to stop evil is brilliantly played out. On the other hand the central plot, a mad scientist who steals the dreams of children with a wife who is a midget and who has seven identical sons, is a terrible hash. Who these people are, why they are the way they are, what their relation to their world is (for instance, where do they get the resources to buy stolen children?) is never addressed. The mushiness of central plot keeps this very interesting movie from being more, than "interesting
Rating:
Summary: Twisted and nightmarish at first, but ultimately beautiful.
Review: Recipe for "Lost Children:" 1-Take generous helpings of Oliver Twist and Dune and mix well. 2-Stir in some Twelve Monkeys and add a dash of Frankenstein. 3-Lace sparingly with The Matrix, and garnish with a little Freaks. If you enjoy the work of Lynch, Gilliam etc, and indeed other Jeunet & Caro offerings, this wonderful film will also be for you. At first, the experience is confusing and nightmarish, but so compelling. (After a second viewing I was in love!) You feel much better about the film when the pieces start to fit together, and then you can really get into all the positive, optimistic aspects of the story. The tender, heart warming friendship between the streetwise young orphan "Miette" and the gentle giant "One" is just delightful. All the characters are unusual and interesting, but the evil "Krank" is wickedly entertaining. Angelo Badalamenti's score is hauntingly beautiful, and perfectly suited to this film. In view of his collaboration with David Lynch who also makes films that are dark but full of beauty, he was the only choice for this production. The DVD package is pretty good with lots of extras. The two most enjoyable and impressive features are the commentary, and the language selection, which has the options of French, English and Spanish soundtracks and subtitles. The default setting is the film as it was originally intended: unsubtitled in French. If you do not speak French I strongly recommend that you switch on the subtitles. If you go for the dubbed version a lot of the magic will be lost.
Rating:
Summary: Don't compare!
Review: This review is for you Amelie fans out there who will go back and watch Jeunet's early works. Most of the other reviews hit the real film reviews about COLC. Is it amazing visually? Yes! Jean-Pierre Jeunet is brilliant as a cinemagraphic director. If you've ever wanted to view a like-real-life fantasy-adventure, almost any Jeunet work will fit the bill. An odd movie? Definitely. Fun? Absolutely. Definitely worth seeing. Amelie is great movie. Solid story. Gorgeous heroine. Wonderful cinemagraphics. But, DO NOT JUDGE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN BY AMELIE. You cannot compare the two. They are night-n-day in almost all areas: production dates (1994 v. 2001 - so much has changed), graphic production (digital v. non-digital), story tone (light v. dark fantasy), film location (on-location v. set designs), story origin (autobiographical stories v. fictional visions), and the ever-influencing BUDGET (huge v. miniscule). I'm sure there are more. Each movie is a product of Jeunet's personal time and place (watch disk 2 of Amelie to understand where I'm coming from with this). Each movie has its pluses and minuses and could be improved. Go in with a fresh mind and expect anything and nothing at the same time. You'll get more out of this movie and more appreciation for Jeunet as a wonderful director/screenwriter. And we know both movies are hands down better than the junk being churned out of that place in LA.
Rating:
Summary: Surrial ,but wonderfull
Review: The movie is so surrial, but at the same time it is so realistick!The children been stolen from the place, where we never been before. The augly guy, the good guy, saved them all. But this is not what this story is about.It is about LOVE!!!Love to someone, whom you never met before.Love to someone whom you want to love -- a little girl, defensless, but so strong.The movie is FRIENCH, and the actors are perfect!The same people who made ALIEN-4.(after this one).
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: From the duo that made the visually innovative and exhilarating Delicatessen, the City of Lost Children exhibits the same ability to translate dreams to the screen, share a poetic and original vision, as shown since in Alien Resurrection and Amelie. Ultimately though, this movie is a disappointment : poor dialogues, and, mostly, a wholly predictable plot. A fairy tale it is, a visual treat no doubt, but lacking of a compelling story.
Rating:
Summary: Inventive and Visually Stunning
Review: In watching Jeunet and Caro's film "City Of Lost Children" for the first time, I got lost, unable to find what the plotline was, and normally would have just given up if not for the dazzling setpieces and identifiable characters. As I continued watching, the plot became more focused, while the story never lost focus and the scenery stayed sharp. Even the ending stayed unknown as to who lives and who dies (at least for the most part). The fact that I have seen it easily over 100 times now shows how fresh something can be putting together all the parts that make a great movie. Ron Perlman, as "One", plays a great fish-out-of-water, speaking broken French and not being street-wise, and still manages to draw sympathy from the watcher. Judith Vittet, "Miette" in the film, does a wonderful job showing how a person can develop, given the right set of circumstances. And Daniel Emilfork, as the evil "Krank", still shows patience and respect under that vicious surface. The rest of the characters, from The Professeur to Marthe, from the evil sisters to the little brother, all come through well throughout the film, enhancing the movie by showing character depth. The movie itself is about a man, "One", trying to find his "little brother" after he gets kidnapped by a band of cyclopses to be sold to a man without dreams. If this sounds a little odd to make a movie around, you couldn't be more right. But somehow it works in this film, and works well. As "One" meets "Miette" and together they take the weird twists and turns through their journey, you can't help but cheer them on. Even on the "evil" side, some characters rise above it, showing wisdom, humour, and regret. This film is much enjoyed by me, and I highly recommend it to everyone (as long as you can tolerate subtitles; the dubbed version is a little... off).
Rating:
Summary: A visual feast
Review: This film, from the directing team of Jeunet & Caro (also behind Delicatessen), is best approached on its own terms. You have seen nothing like it, and probably will not--at least not from Hollywood. The bare bones of the plot is as follows: an old man who can't dream kidnaps children from the streets of France and brings them to his laboratory where he hooks them up to a complicated machine designed to show him their dreams. Working for him in the lab are his wife (a near dwarf) and six clones (all played by Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon, who you may recognize from Amelie). That's basically it. Of course, the children have to be rescued, so why not have circus strongman Ron Perlman do it? After all, his little brother was one of the kidnapped. (I have now seen Perlman in a Spanish film--Cronos--and this French film, as well as his English work. Do other actors do this kind of thing?) I was enthralled by the visuals in this film. The effects involving having three or more clones onscreen at the same time are particularly impressive. Obviously the plot is a bit odd, but it's the way the story is told that is so engrossing. And the acting is superb, specifically the young heroine, who seems years beyond her age. You will fall into this picture.
Rating:
Summary: SIMPLY STUNNING
Review: THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN is a film the likes of which you will see rarely in a lifetime. The reference in one of the reviews below, 'Dickens meets Dick', is an apt one -- the orphan children could be straight out of one of Charles Dickens' masterworks, and the setting itself, along with most of the other characters, could easily have sprung from the mind of sci-fi genius Philip K. Dick (who wrote the novella 'Do androids dream of electric sheep', upon which BLADE RUNNER was based). Ron Perlman shines in his role as the gentle circus strongman who goes by the simple name of 'One', searching for his 'little brother' who has been kidnapped. The young girl who plays Miette, whom he adopts as a 'little sister', is perfect. And the villains...? There are a ton of baddies in this incredible film -- all of them played to the hilt, the twisted stuff of nightmares. Picture an evil pair of Siamese twins, a brain floating in a fish tank, a fumbling family of sub-genius clones, and an army of mechanically-augmented cyclopses -- you'll begin to see what I mean... This film is a great example to Hollywood of what special effects should be -- they should be used to invoke a sense of place and mood, not simply to blow things up in grand scale (although there's a bit of that here, as well). The mood that pervades the film is extremely dreamlike -- the shifting unreality that accompanies hallucinogenic nightmares coupled with a palpable sense of solidity. The director that came to my mind as I was watching this is Terry Gilliam -- his work (TIME BANDITS, THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUCHAUSEN, THE FISHER KING, &c) has stunned me in the past in the same manner that this film did. THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN is a modern masterpiece -- it's certainly not for every taste, but if you enjoy imaginitive fabulist film-making, you shouldn't allow yourself to miss it.
Rating: 
Summary: It's Unique, Artsy, Po-Mo - and Quite French
Review: Riding on the success of Amelie, the works of director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who actually co-directed City of Lost Children with Marc Caro) are reaching a wider audience. City of Lost Children is the film Jeunet directed before Alien 4 and, like Amelie, it has a strange, dream-like quality that is both enticing and difficult to swallow. That, however, is where the similarities between the two films end. Speaking of dreams, that's exactly what City of Lost Children focuses on - the power and meaning of nocturnal images. Set in a dystopic future, a mad scientist living on what appears to be an abandoned oil platform kidnaps children to attempt to siphon their dreams, so that he can once again enjoy sleep. When he makes off with one of circus strongman Ron Perlman's friends, the gentle giant sets off to discover the city of lost children in the middle of the ocean. City of Lost Children is a difficult movie to pin down; one part Monty Python, two parts Dark City, and one part Mad Max, it is, at once, a post-modern farce and a brilliant piece of art. It's confusing and intentionally so. It follows the po-mo rule "weird for the sake of being weird," but in so doing redeems itself as a movie that, on some level, works. Make no mistake: City of Lost Children is not for everyone. In fact, even if someone liked Amelie, that person might not enjoy this film. It's not a film for "smart people" or movie geeks (although they like to talk about it ad nauseum); it's a film that captures the essence of dreams and proceeds to eke a 100-minute movie from it. The DVD presentation is superb, with a great video and sound transfer both on the original French track and the decent English dub (although purists will, no doubt, tell you to watch it in French). While not a reference-quality disc, it should certainly satisfy any fan of the movie. If one is unsure, City of Lost Children is a rent-before-you-buy deal. Definitely NOT a DVD to buy "blind."
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