Open Your Eyes (DVD)

Amenabar's debut film, Abre Los Ojos, is destined for a far wider international audience now it's been remade as a Tom Cruise vehicle. Plus of course, the director had his own international success story with The Others. I'm confident that the vast majority of people will find this debut superior to Vanilla Sky, and they'll be right. But not entirely right. In any case, summarising the plot of this curious Spanish film is made a lot easier by the fact that Cameron Crowe recreated most of it shot for shot. The lead character is Cesar (Eduardo Noriega), a young man with money, looks and very few worries. We see him with attractive women, and with ...  Read the complete review

Otherwise known in originally in Spanish as “Abre los ojos” and as “Ouvre les yeux” in France, this film has been largely unheralded on its initial release in 1997 until the recent remake (Vanilla Sky) hit the silver screen. As I’m a bit of a sceptic with Hollywood taking on foreign films and completely ruining them (The Vanishing anyone?), and seeing as Channel 4 decided to show this original at the weekend, I decided to see what all the fuss is about before dragging my lazy backside off to the cinema to see the new version. The first thing to point out, though it should be pretty obvious, is that the film is entirely ...  Read the complete review