Rent The Portuguese Nun (2009)

Not my kind of religion - The Portuguese Nun review by DJ

This director has a "style": expressionless actors delivering lines without emotion or inflection; dialogue that is verbose and (faux?) intellectual without any of the characteristics of normal conversation; depopulated sets - even in circumstances that would be bustling with life; very long, lingering shots panning across the set or the cityscape; artfully prepared scenes that somehow feature a 'picture within the picture' - an actor playing a nun encounters a nun, actors making love in a movie within the movie reproduce the scene in their 'real' life etc.

So it's an Emporer's new clothes movie: you either think it's terribly clever and interesting and different and challenging and a brilliant way to illustrate some philosophical arguments, or you think it's tedious, contrived, self-absorbed trivia. Some reviewers gave this film 5 stars, so it's clearly my failing that I fall firmly into the second group