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Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner, Elsa Pataky, Robert Miano, Valentina Izumi ... see more see more... , Byron Deidra , Luis Molteni , Taiyo Yamanouchi

An English-language throwback to the type of distinctly Italian thriller that earned him the international reputation as "The Italian Hitchcock," Dario Argento's Giallo once again teams the director w... read more read more...ith producer and younger sibling Claudio Argento to tell the tale of a serial slasher with a penchant for cutting beautiful women. After discovering that her sister has been abducted by a notorious serial killer who operates under the name "Yellow," an American flight attendant enlists the aid of an Italian investigator in seeking out her missing sibling. Asia Argento, Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Elsa Pataky star in this thriller, penned by screenwriters Jim Agnew and Sean Keller. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

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930 ratings

R, 1 hr. 32 min.

Directed by: Dario Argento

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DVD Release Date: October 19, 2010

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Flixster Reviews (193)

  • WrenchLT
    October 5, 2011
    WrenchLT
    Dario Argento's latest offering has been absolutely torn to shreds by fans and critics so I wasn't expecting much from this at all but I ended up enjoying it a lot more than others seemed to. The story is fairly straightforward which has a New York FBI agent based in Turino on th... read moree trail of a killer who has bern kidnapping and murdering pretty foreign women. It's a pretty violent film with a real vicious streak to it so it racks up a decent amount of bloody content. The film has a good pace and is never boring and always on the move. You can't help but laugh at the killer though with his strong resemblance to John Rambo lol! The films ending was a little anti-climactic unfortunately, it could have gone out with a bit more of a bang or a plot twist. I found this one better than Argento's previous two films, especially The Card Player. It's not great but it still has entertainment value.
  • LWOODS04
    August 26, 2011
    LWOODS04
    Cast: Adrien Brody, Elsa Pataky, Emmanuelle Seigner, Bryon Deidra, Robert Miano, Luis Molteni, Taiyo Yamanouchi

    Director: Dario Argento

    Summary: Adrien Brody stars as Insp. Enzo Avolfi, who trails a sadistic serial killer in this thriller from Italian horror master Dario ... read moreArgento. As the mutilated bodies of beautiful women litter Milan, Avolfi races to find the latest abductee. When Linda (Emmanuelle Seigner) reports her fashion model sister Celine (Elsa Pataky) missing, Avolfi knows the death clock ticks. Now he must step into madness to stop the psychopath (Bryon Deidra).

    My Thoughts: "Wow, this was kinda, no it was, bad. No thrill, no scare, not even a decent killer. The music was bad too. A bit dramatic when it wasn't needed. The acting...well it just wasn't great either and I was so surprised that Adrien Brody could read this script and come to the conclusion that it was worth his talent. I can just assume he needed the money cause this has to be the worse film I have seen him in. This was a big miss in every way."
  • matertenebraum
    April 14, 2011
    matertenebraum
    Even the worst Dario Argento films have managed to at least get DVD releases in the past decade or so, so the fact that Giallo was filmed two years ago and is still unreleased in most of the world aside from a handful of badly received festival screenings where it was laughed off... read more the screen doesn't exactly fill you with confidence. It may not be the director's favorite film by a long shot - despite the misleading 'written and directed by' credit, he was simply a director for hire with the script written by the separately credited Jim Agnew and Sean Keller with the producers apparently no longer returning his phone calls - but it's fair to say that it's a long way from being his worst, thankfully never descending to the depths of Phantom of the Opera or the lacklustre The Card Player. Unfortunately it's also not especially good.

    The story is serviceable enough, with model Elsa Pataky abducted by a deformed serial killer who likes to take his time destroying beautiful things and her frantic sister (a haggard Emmanuelle Seigner) teaming up with Adrian Brody's broody Italian-American cop to find her while there's still enough of her to find. Despite the set-up, it avoids going the Eli Roth torture porn route, but there are few of Argento's signature flourishes. Not only are the gloves literally off but the film's one 'big' death scene is nothing to write home about: just a simple fall from a tall building. Worse, a couple of minor twists aside, the plot just plods along with not much happening until the last half hour before a last scene that feels like it was tacked on not so much to give the film a happy ending but because what you suspect was the original ending didn't pack enough of a punch.

    While it's generally better executed, there are fewer ideas to play with than his less than impressive Mother of Tears, and what there are are fairly familiar cop movie clichés. True, Adrien Brody's lone cop does have a rather neat backstory explaining why he has a talent for tracking down predatory killers, but the early hints of having a damaging Will Graham-like empathy with his killer come to nothing despite Brody playing both hunters because they're such wildly different performances linked only by silly voices (a grizzled Jack Nicholson-Mickey Rourke hybrid for the cop and an Italian Quasimodo for the killer). It's probably the killer's voice that provided the lion's share of the laughs to those derisive festival audiences, but Brody Methodically overdoes the tortured doleful looks as the cop, at times looking like the Eighth Dwarf, Goatee, after Snow White bit the apple.

    On the plus side, thanks to Frederic Fasano's cinematography it's the best-looking Argento film in years. It's not a return to the extreme and vivid colors of the Suspiria years but it's a welcome move away from the pallid and lifeless look of many of his latter movies to something with a bit more warmth to its color scheme and a good eye for the Turin locations. But overall, despite all the Argento touchstones the writers incorporated in the screenplay, it's a rather soft by-the-numbers effort that could have been made by almost any capable director whose heart wasn't quite in it but still tried to make the best of what he had to work with. You won't have trouble making it through to the end, but you won't have trouble sleeping after seeing it either.
  • sononothing
    November 26, 2010
    sononothing
    Giallo has to be one of the dumbest thrillers I've witnessed in a long time. It's a meandering piece of drivel filled with the typical cliches and twists that have filled the genre for the last fifty years, culminating in a climax that is not fulfilling and brings the film screec... read morehing to a halt you'll glad to achieve after the 90 minutes of claptrap. The film is about an ugly yellow killer, killing models while being pursued by a cop from New York (Adrian Brody). Add in some gore and a crappy script and you get the idea. I can't say much more about it other than it sucks. Cheers.
  • thefog1331
    October 23, 2010
    thefog1331
    And continuing Argento's downward trend...
  • yona71
    October 23, 2010
    yona71
    Always good to see something new from the brilliant Dario Argento.
    Giallo is a film dealing with a brutal killer that tortures and ultimately kills his victims in unspeakable ways.
    It centers upon an American woman(Emmanuelle Seigner) in Milan who teams up with a top notch Itali... read morean detective(Adrien Brody) to track down her sister who has vanished.
    The suspense created with the fine cinematography, music,bloodshed, etc. helps define the stark madness of an outcast who turns his hatred of himself on the beautiful. Giallo means yellow(cowardly) in Italian which is so well defined with the happenings in this film.
  • ceWEBrity
    July 11, 2010
    ceWEBrity
    A pretty profound disappointment, this is a generally unimaginative giallo, reading more like torture porn than an homage to the form that inspired it. harrycaul makes a great point about its loaded title; a movie directed by Dario Argento, starring Adrien Brody, and called "GIAL... read moreLO" in enormous yellow letters promises emptily to be some revelatory throwback thriller. Instead, what we have here is a lazily plotted, lazily shot movie that really seems to lack for inspiration. There are a couple of interesting narrative conceits toward the end of the film, like a creative mutual choke-hold that the villain and the heroine have each other in and a jarring final clash between her and Brody, but really, there isn't much here that we haven't seen before. The performances are half-decent, but I'm not a big fan of Emmanuelle Sagnier. Her face seems frozen. Brody is clearly invested, but the movie never offers a reason to care about the character. The parallel between his past tragedies and his current obsessions, additionally, doesn't really mesh. And, uh, the guy playing the killer is pretty ridiculous and not scary in the slightest. Argento seems content to let these discordant pieces of the film fall into place and form a final product, rather than helping them to work in unison. There isn't much that compels Giallo from scene to scene, not the least of which is its rather minimal sense of urgency (and there should be some definite urgency here). I still enjoyed the movie on a basic level, but it could have been so much more, both within and outside of its pedigree.

    If you want to be a really fancy film nerd, you could posit this as a pseudo-biography of Argento himself. As someone who's spent his career leveling himself against accusations of misogyny, the "destroying something beautiful" aspect of the film could easily be slapped on him. Apparently he suffered jaundice as a child too. Pretty uncomfortable to think about, but interesting nonetheless.
  • briandeguelle
    April 25, 2010
    briandeguelle
    O M G what a piece of shit!!!!! I am sorry but Dario Argento is one of the wrost directors ever and rides the wagon with Uwe Boll. But at least boll is fun to watch! I have not seen any argento film that i liked but this is surly the worst of all. And adrien Brody W T F was he do... read moreing starring and producing in this.The two leads just stand there looking wooded and not intrested at all. The plot is flat and boring.Just stay away from this........you have been warned...
  • blacksheepboy
    December 26, 2009
    blacksheepboy
    Argento's new giallo never goes beyond conventional, since the actors are all inexpressive here, the plot is only ordinary, and he never displays the directing skills that made him such a respected cult filmmaker.
  • harrycaul
    November 26, 2009
    harrycaul
    Just as the term film noir was coined by the French to describe the cinematic equivalent of their black-jacketed hardboiled crime literature, the giallo, the Italian slasher movie, derives its name from the series of lurid, yellow paperbacks that directly inspired t... read morehe films. By boldly naming his movie after the genre that has sustained him for the past forty years - the genre which he has done more than anybody else to popularise and of which he was once the undisputed master - you'd be forgiven for thinking that Dario Argento has something important to say here. A definitive statement? The culmination of a lifetime's work? Dare we even whisper it, a return to form?!?! Alas, nothing could be further from the truth. I won't give anything away because, quite frankly, this utterly dreadful film is short of surprises, even lame ones; let's just say I was reading too much into the origin of that title.

    Aside from the increasingly unpleasant level of misogyny on display, Argento's recent work has been characterised by a preference for realistic backdrops. To say that Argento and realism go together like oil and water would be an understatement; realism is the salt to his slug! Even the best of Argento is too silly to bear close scrutiny but it gets by on bravura style coupled with a certain dreamlike logic; shine the harsh, natural light of day into his world and it just falls apart, becomes ridiculous. Argento is also one of those directors whose films rarely reach a satisfactory conclusion; they either end too abruptly or contain a final twist they'd have been better off without, Opera being a good example of the latter. As with Sleepless, the credits of Giallo begin to roll before the movie seems to have finished, as if the director reached an arbitrary point, got bored (what took him so long???) and called a wrap.

    Anyway, I've now come to the conclusion that Dario Argento should be forcibly restrained from making any more movies. Oh, just in case you can't see through terrible acting and worse make-up, here's an anagram for your two year old child to solve: Byron Deidra

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Critic Reviews

Anton Bitel
November 12, 2010
Anton Bitel, Little White Lies

in making us wonder whether the gross incompetence on display here is his true face or yet another of his masks, Argento may have found himself a new mode of directorial cat-and-mouse. Full Review

Leslie Felperin
February 23, 2012
Leslie Felperin, Variety

Click to read the article Full Review

Mark Kermode
August 30, 2011
Mark Kermode, BBC Radio Five Live

Click to read the article Full Review

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