Synopsis
The Queen of Selvascura risks everything to be a mother; the King of Roccaforte falls in love with the voice of a mysterious girl; the King of Altomonte becomes obsessed with a flea and neglects his daughter.
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Cast
- Salma Hayek PinaultQueen of Longtrellis
- Vincent CasselKing of Strongcliff
- Toby JonesKing of Highhills
- Shirley HendersonImma
- Hayley CarmichaelDora
- Bebe CaveViolet
- Stacy MartinYoung Dora
- Christian LeesElias
- Jonah LeesJonah
- Guillaume DelaunayOgre
Recommendations
- 100
The Guardian
It is a masterpiece of black-comic bad taste and a positive carnival of transgression. The secret is the deadpan seriousness with which everything is treated. - 83
Hitfix
A slightly bumpy two hours of storytelling, but it's peppered with wonder and unexpected humor. - 80
CineVue
With starkly enigmatic, but beautifully wrought and filigree imagery, with a dark cutting humour which is bleak rather than ironic, Garrone is not interested in touching our hearts or giving us a comfortable moral. - 80
The Hollywood Reporter
Tale of Tales combines the wildly imaginative world of kings, queens and ogres with the kind of lush production values for which Italian cinema was once famous. The result is a dreamy, fresh take on the kind of dark and gory yarns that have come down to us from the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault, only here they're pleasingly new and unfamiliar. - 80
Screen Daily
Garrone’s new film reminds us that traditional fables don’t need injections of contemporary relevance to grip, stir and disturb us. - 80
The Telegraph
Tale of Tales dances on a razor’s edge between funny and unnerving, with sequences of shadow-spun horror rubbing up against moments of searing baroque beauty. The result is a fabulously sexy, defiantly unfashionable readymade cult item. - 80
Time Out London
Tale of Tales might lack magic in the immediate, flashy sense, but its strange spell is altogether seductive and special. - 75
IndieWire
Although wobbly in parts like so many cinematic anthologies, Garrone's alternately silly and entrancing adaptation of Giambattista Basile's Neapolitan stories provides a welcome gothic antidote to more stately treatments of similar material.
