“In the City of Sylvia is pure pleasure and pure cinema,” writes J Hoberman. “The fifth feature by Catalan filmmaker Jose Luis Guerín (shown once at the 2007 New York Film Festival) celebrates the love of looking, while placing a crafty minimalist spin on the Orpheus myth.”

In the New York Times, Nathan Lee finds Sylvia to be “a frequently hypnotic, if sometimes irritating, meditation on the act of looking. What women will make of this picture - the sine qua non of chic, formalist exercises predicated on the “male gaze” - I can”t presume to guess….. The rigorously geometric cat-and-mouse sequence that follows is more irksome, both for the all-too-obvious debt to Vertigo (and the many highbrow stalker films it has inspired) and for the sense that Mr Guerin has stopped making a movie and has started advancing a proposition that”s he”s obligated to complete.”

Update, 12/13.

By:  dwhudson                        Source