The Prestige (2006)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
A mysterious story of two magicians whose intense rivalry leads them on a life-long battle for supremacy -- full of obsession, deceit and jealousy with dangerous and deadly consequences.
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26 films that influenced The Prestige
What critics say influenced The Prestige
(It also allows for a final image that beautifully evokes Edgar G. Ulmer's 1934 masterpiece The Black Cat.) Perhaps the most significant change, though, is not so much a change as an elaboration a fleshing out of the concept that Angier is a natural performer, but not a natural magician, while Borden is exactly the reverse.
Just don’t look too hard for Borges or Kafka here; John Huston’s “The List of Adrian Messenger” and Anthony Shaffer’s “Sleuth” are the true spiritual ancestors of “The Prestige”.
Long stretches in fact threaten to turn The Prestige into a Grand Guignol melodrama not unlike David Cronenberg's extraordinary version of The Fly .
Decades before “Star Trek” and “The Fly” showed us how to transport people instantly between places near and remote, dueling magicians were doing it in turn-of-the-century theaters.
In 1994, both Michael Keaton (Batman) and Christopher Reeve (Superman) appeared in the film "Speechless."
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The long, graphic battle scene of the landing on Iwo Jima, filmed in desaturated colors, recalls the opening of Saving Private Ryan, and the final shot, in which we revisit the same beachhead in the present, is straight out of Schindler's List.
Despite marketing itself on its twists and setting, the movie is really a variation of “Moby Dick” – a sinister and ultimately tragic exploration of the cost of taking an obsession for revenge too far (guess Bale is the white whale).
When laid out and actually examined, the material is a ludicrous Grand Guignol melodrama featuring villainous moustaches and fake beards, machines never seen on earth outside “The Bride of Frankenstein”, Xeroxing taken to the nth degree, and doubles lurking everywhere wearing false noses.
Annette Bening, who keeps getting better with every movie she makes, plays the mother as a darker twist on the loveable narcissist she created for last year's Being Julia.
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Nolan's film flips backwards and forwards through time like he's having a Memento flashback.
The remake "Insomnia" and the franchise-rejuvenator "Batman Begins" notwithstanding, this is the Nolan brothers' true follow-up to their 2001 masterpiece "Memento."
The script -- by director Christopher Nolan ( Batman Begins , Insomnia ) and his brother, Jonathan (who also cowrote Nolan’s Memento ), and based on a novel by Christopher Priest -- is itself a juggling act, bouncing back and forth in time, teasing us with snippets of information doled out slowly in a way that’s wonderfully agonizing, and then suddenly taking wicked 90-degree turns that call into question everything that’s come before.
He first twisted "Memento" into a feverish nightmare of audience surprise, then went on to the dark puzzle of "Insomnia."
The Prestige like Nolans earlier puzzle movie, the celebrated Memento is a brilliantly interconnected but chilly mechanism in which each element is a carefully integrated part of the whole, but the effect of the whole is somewhat alienating.
Nolan, who was so brilliant in his time-skipping storylines in "Memento" and "Batman Begins," weaves a tantalizing yarn that juggles your allegiance in what increasingly becomes an escalating contest between two villains.
In Hollywood, Christopher Nolan has been dealing with ideas about simulacra, memory, and human psychology in films as disparate as Memento, The Prestige , and Inception .