Review of The Portuguese Woman

The photography, lighting, decor, costumes, and sets were outstanding, of painting-like quality. The craft and obsession with detail were obvious throughout. If Movies were made of a collection of small moments of visual pleasure this would have been a 10. But, in the tradition of a certain kind of cinema (Manoel de Oliveira is an obvious reference to cite here, in both good and bad) there were issues with character development, artificial dialogues that lend the characters less compelling than they could be, and pace that is often ludicrous (with singing in between, that I'm sure made sense at the time, but...) and confuses the story, making it almost as unbelievable as any Marvel-type effort.