The circus isn’t as romantic as it used to be. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey recently closed their tent for the final time after 146 years, the plight of animal performers is much too sad to ignore, and anyone with an affinity for peanuts can go to the ballpark instead. At the margins, though, there’s still a world of acrobats, bearded ladies, and lion tamers trekking from town to town as they eke out an existence at risk of fading away entirely — a world given beautiful expression in “Mister Universo.”
Not since “Big Fish” have we seen this world onscreen in such vivid detail, though Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s scope isn’t as grandiose or fantastical as Tim Burton’s. A docudrama that in its early scenes feels like a documentary — the co-directors have a nonfiction background, and the actors are actual carnival performers — the film plays...
Not since “Big Fish” have we seen this world onscreen in such vivid detail, though Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s scope isn’t as grandiose or fantastical as Tim Burton’s. A docudrama that in its early scenes feels like a documentary — the co-directors have a nonfiction background, and the actors are actual carnival performers — the film plays...
- 7/25/2017
- by Michael Nordine
- Indiewire
You wouldn’t typically catch me recommending a movie on the basis of its crowd-pleasingness or heart-warmingness, dead or alive. But we’re living in warped times, and it’s a travesty that Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel’s crowd-pleasing, heart-warming not-quite-documentary feature Mister Universo — which I caught by happenstance at last year’s Festival International du Film de Marrakech — didn’t have the good fortune of securing a Us distribution deal after playing festivals around the world last year. The movie stars Tairo Caroli, a 19-year-old lion tamer from a real-life traveling circus in Italy, as himself. Among his few prized possessions is an […]...
- 7/21/2017
- by Steve Macfarlane
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
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