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"What begins as a history lesson between a mother and her daughter on a cruise ship turns into something a lot more fanciful…The 95-year-old director appears unstoppable." - Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
"A Talking Picture is one of those great late works in which a master dares to put aside aesthetic concerns and his own ego..." - Amy Taubin, Film Comment
"In its own eccentric way, A Talking Picture is sublime...It has the air of remote, classical literature notionally and rather reluctantly transposed to a modern, cinematic setting...Malkovich gives an absolutely extraordinary performance as the cruise-ship commander in dazzling white uniform, drawling bonmots with Catherine Deneuve at the captain's table...The whole thing ends with a melodramatic flourish which sent me into a kind of clinical shock ..."
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (UK)
"The feeling of participating in a time of decadence is the subject of Manoel de Oliveira's latest opus...Open to the sounds of what's going on in the world, Oliveira sees this end as the coming together of a cycle which will regenerate differently and in forms we don't know...A Talking Picture leaves the spectator dumbfounded, thrown from the cinema by a radical ending which leaves little space for idealism." - Didier Peron, Liberation (France)
"Simply ingenious...Starts as a history lesson, followed by tones of sophisticated comedy and finishes as a drama..." - Roberto Nepoti, La Republica (Italy)
"A testament to the fifth Rome, the utopia of the community of nations, comprising today's Europe...Oliveira is an old man who has the courage needed to challenge our contemporary utopia -- the ideology of pooh-poohing controversial issues and hoping they will somehow go away...Even if -- as we all hope -- Oliveira's message of the coming end of Western civilization and the advent of a new Middle Ages is only a warning, this film is among the most important pictures shown at this year's Venice Festival." - Janina Kumaniecka, FIPRESCI (International Critics Association)
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