Using the exact philosophical problem of the Spanish Inquisition (torture brings only desperation, not truth), Forman has created a posh nightmare disguised as a costume drama in Goya's Ghost. Like his masterpiece "Amadeus", he's showing the gritty, vile humanity underneath the garish outfits & wigs of mid-millennia high-society. All the performances are great, the story is great, everything looks great...30% on RT?? I don't get it; an underrated tone parable.

Director Milos Forman has completely botched this disjointed mess of a story, "Goya's Ghosts". Direction, camera-work, and music are all distracting and confusing. Having Portman play Mother and Daughter was an awful choice - and the direction she takes is misplaced. Her characters are naive simpletons. By the end of the movie we've come full circle with societal changes and the mockery is complete and the dead horse continues to get beaten. Anytime you jump 15 years in story, you'd better be sure you have all loose ends tied up and they just don't seem so. How can the Head Priest not have passed away in 15 years, or the Lorenzo character actually look younger? These were technical problems. The revolution scenes seemed badly staged, and the Ines character's family some how dies the same day she's released. Give this one a miss unless you enjoy the period piece. It's worth repeating too, the music and score seemed woefully out-of-place - almost like James Bond music. A bad movie in a lot of ways.

I think Milos Forman's quote gives a good idea to the viewers who wanted to see the biopic of the Spanish Painter, Francisco Goya, that the painter would not be a main character of the film. Memories of his own childhood and youth, reflection on the years spent under the suffocating power of the oppressive political regimes are the main subjects of his film that takes place in Spain of the late 18th -beginning of the 19th centuries and focuses realistically on the role of the Inquisition and its end under Napoleon's rule. Forman was a college student when he read and studied the book about Spanish Inquisition that affected all aspects in the lives of the ordinary people but it took him many years to envision the film that would bring his reflection to life through the paintings, drawings and prints of the great Artist who had captured the spirit of those times brilliantly. I personally love "Goya's Ghosts. Visually, it was just like Goya's painting spanned in time and space. I've always admired Goya, ever since I read the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, and saw Goya's paintings and prints first as a teenager in reproductions and Art books. Few years ago I saw many of his originals for the first time in Prado, Madrid. They were very different - dark, twisted, macabre, sensual, serene, tender, satiric, realistic, romantic, hallucinatory, surreal, very Spanish yet universal in their understanding of human nature. "Everyone wants to seem what they are not, all deceive each other and no-one knows himself," wrote Francisco Goya on one of his prints. His works are strange mixture of horror and hope, monsters born while the mind wonders in the dream world (the series Los Capriccios), the formal portraits of the royal family with not a single flattering image. They were created during the times when Inquisition ruled the country with an iron hand, and the time is the real hero of the Milos Forman's movie. Goya has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. It is not just a coincidence that Goya lived and created his paintings and prints that captured closely the time when Spain was changing slowly from old times to new modern epoch but how slow and painful the changes were. The story in the movie may seem too blizzard and implausible but if you look closer in the movie's images, you'd realize that the characters of the story, the whole surrealistic and wild content came directly from Goya's works, his paintings, drawings, and prints. He lived through surreal time, and the time got a fascinating treatment in his works and in the work of the great modern film director, Milos Forman. The final scene of the film with all Goya's ghosts presented and with him capturing the bitterly ironic in their grotesque absurdity images in his sketch book is a masterwork of cinema.

When I saw "Goya's Ghosts," I concluded that it was a movie about nothing. To be sure, Milos Forman's direction was expert. The performances were good, especially those of Javier Bardem (as Father Lorenzo) and Stellan Skarsgard (as Francisco Goya). The sets were beautiful. But can one point to a unifying thread in this film? Not really. In the beginning, "Goya's Ghosts" appears to be a movie about the Spanish Inquisition, but half way through it switches gears completely. We are treated to a French invasion (which is eerily similar to the current Iraq War, if you watch carefully the language some of the French officers are using), French atrocities, Goya's reunion with Inez, prostitutes, the British invasion and then the Spanish Inquisition all over again. In the final scene, we witness a wretched mad woman Inez (played by Natalie Portman)carrying a baby and following corpse of Lorenzo stretched out on a cart pulled by a donkey, while ironically cheerful Spanish music is played in the background.So what was the point of this movie? A mystery, but perhaps the answer lies in the opening scene, when we see Lorenzo and other members of the Spanish Inquisition looking over Goya's etchings. "Goya's Ghosts" is not about anything in particular, unless you want to point to very broad themes. Rather, it is a depiction of Spanish life in all its diversity during the late 18th and early 19th century, as seen through the works of Goya. "Goya's Ghosts" are not pretty. They are ugly, absurd, irrational, and downright annoying. The trials and tribulations that these ghosts go through are neverending and no one ever gets closure and certainly no poetic justice. The problems of today will become the problems of tomorrow. But perhaps that's life back then. People live lives without purpose or resolution and then they die. They never find solutions to the big problems of the day. People suffer without finding a way to alleviate the suffering. People are frustrated repeated by others, because the people back then (like those of today) are blind to their own faults or simply too selfish to care about others. Certainly, Goya (in this film) felt that sense of frustration. So in his depiction of Spanish life, Milos Forman does achieve something significant; but it is not the kind of film that people, who are accustomed to stories, are likely to appreciate.