The Ninth Gate (1999)

What a waste of my time!!!

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

the film is great when the protagonist begins the journey. reluctantly taking on the task of locating a book nearly lost to time but all copies are being collected. nefarious cults and a mysterious helper cloud his mind as he faces death and if forced to do what he doesn't wish to do. seriously there is a jump off a cliff in the end i recommend shutting the movie off when the green eyes make sense. all that comes after is a crappy cartoony light and castle i admit a good ending to this film would have been difficult an Polanski didn't meet it.Depp is great in his role

I first saw this near it's release & was totally oblivious to it's subtle charms. Having re-watched it again, and again, with new eyes & consciousness I must say it's up there with the most cherished films in my collection. I won't give away anything in regards to plot/spoilers but I will say that the beautiful woodcuts in the film bear more attention than the camera gives them. For me The Ninth Gate is Polanski's love letter to the occult, far superior than his other films that dip a toe in those waters and are somehow held in much higher regard. Depp is so superb throughout I could almost forgive him for that Jack Sparrow nonsense (how many though, really?). The supporting cast are all on the money & the score by Wojciech Kilar (Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Pianist) is one to seek out in isolation. If you like the film it's also well worth checking the net for sites expanding & discussing it's themes- The Ninth Gate continues to be appreciated & inspire new audiences many years after it's release.

superb occult horror film , with a good solid cast - fantastic direction from Roman Polanski - deep story line - however as a bibliophile , most of my concentration was concerned with the book collections of the people Johnny Depp tracked down , in his quest to find the remaining copies of the ninth gate & I must admit I did shudder at the thought of how they handled the rare books , but as a horror movie it lived up to all expectations , and was quite fast moving from start to finish , I will be settling down with a couple of beers and a friend , to watch it again very soon.

I agree with the observation that there is a fugue-like nature to this script. The slow build up. The layers of the plot peeled away one by one as the characters also become fleshed out and the puzzles solved. I rather like that style of thriller.But I was distracted from an otherwise considered film by the constant product placement by the cigarette industry. Every few minutes the plot stops while somebody gets a fag on. Totally irrelevant to the plot! I can only assume that big tobacco have invested heavily in this production. Even the room sets looked smoke-filled. I kept panicking for the damage everyone was doing to their exceedingly rare and mega-expensive rare book collections! Ruined forever probably.It just wouldn't happen. All this amateur hour marketing totally spoiled this movie experience for me, and I had to dump it. So a crap rating in response to the cheap marketing tricks. Its not the only movie to do this. In the late 90s the tobacco industry was fighting back the clean air lobby by trying to "normalise" smoking again. Fortunately the arrival of Vaping put a stop to this blatant hyping of a product form, except for the Bond films where it was done tongue in cheek as a characteristic of the genre. But yes, here it really did distract from the story line, and spoiled the smooth build up of this movie.