In New York, the French director of the World Bank Mr. Devereaux (Gérard Depardieu) is a pervert and womanizer, partying and participating in gang bangs with women. When he tries to rape the hotel housekeeper in his room, the woman reports to the police. Devereaux is arrested, affecting also the life of his wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset)."Welcome to New York", by Abel Ferrara, is a long, uneven and inconclusive film based on the New York v. Strauss-Kahn case. The story shows the lead character Devereaux as an egocentric, pervert and sick womanizer through excessive sex scenes and his relationship with his daughter and wife. When he is released in house arrest, the screenplay is developed at a very slow pace and is boring. However the lack of conclusion is terrible. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Bem-Vindo a Nova York" ("Welcome to New York")

In some ways Gerard Depardieu is the Gallic Helen Mirren, i.e a more than accomplished actor, admired by his peers, adored by fans, an Award winner yet with a compulsion to take off his/her clothes. He did it first - to my knowledge - back in the 70s in The Last Woman where, not content to spend half the film in the buff, he cut off his penis for an encore. He stops short of self-mutilation here and the one full-frontal scene - it occurs when, following his arrest, he is strip-searched = last no more than a couple of minutes. Depardieu, like most of the cast, phones it in and I suppose one has to give him credit for appearing in something that is both cheesy and sleazy, the sort of role a young actor will take on to get noticed. In fact the only reason I can think of for the appearance of Jacqeline Besset as Depardieu's wife is the fact that she has more or less dropped off the radar and the ego needed a little massaging. There's absolutely nothing to recommend in this movie - perhaps 20 years ago the sex would have sold it, a la Last Tango In Paris, but not in an age where you can access the same thing at the click of a mouse.

Painting used to be a major form of art, as it represented reality through the eyes-and the mind-of the painter, and this act wasn't waiting for the surrealists to invent it as it was inherent in every attempt to represent reality(always an act meaning to link the outside with the inside-reality with perception).Photography and then cinema took over the responsibility of this act, as they both appeared more capable of aiming at the real;meanwhile, a demand for more reality lead to aesthetics(growing in the cinema world like cancer) supposed to emphasize the impression of the real-the worst example of this tendency being perhaps the decay of horror film through the limitless repetitions of camera shaken films that followed the example of Blair witch project- and that impression of the real(always created by manipulating means) became the god of a new world where the demand for truth was believed to be satisfied through the revelation of this reality;that alone was taken as enough to guarantee justice, a remedy to fight all illnesses, racism first of all(which became the top topic of every thinking man), and disillusion as well(the spectators of the contemporary fantasy films laugh at the usually more imaginative means cinema used to use to create its monsters when digital was an unknown word). And then comes Ferrara with his movie, one I wasn't sure I was interested in watching, to remind us of that old painters ethos that used to be trade mark of all great cinema-and still is, in rare cases- painting a real story(more real it couldn't be, and watch here Ferrara is not interested in the subjective element of reality of a Rasomon type)with his palette of pictures,shadows, sounds and edits that refuse to give a dramatic and manipulative tone(compare this with the terrible Gone girl) to the film and create a true work of art that,as all modern art does , is not devoid of meaning, but incorporates the meaning in its form and the austerity with which it gets close to-or keeps a distance from-the characters of the story.So Ferrara, bringing in an aesthetic that reminded me of Robert Bresson, succeeds where Scorsese with his Wolf of Wall Street failed, succeeds even more in giving a cinematic portrait of New York unlike any other, lighting the places in subtle ways and creating poetry out of the ordinary.Furthermore, Welcome to New York is one of the most anticomformist movies ever made attacking political correctness with its power of lack of judgment(although the civilization of moneyworld is surely judged and condemned right from the start)and the thoughts it aims to provoke in all of us regarding the inner truth and the world we are living in.A master film by a director I hadn't appreciated enough in the past.

The movie is a unique affair with one of the strongest main characters I've seen in years. The real story almost disappears and then reenters to keep us grounded but the narration is very human and real and therefore very terrifying. I like how long Ferrara leaves his actors be in the moment and how he always reaches with that length the next layer of a fictional scene. The dark unlit places look great The driving from the airport sounds like New York but in the edit it also sounds like a hellish tunnel Just a great film from a great director. I can't wait for the film to hit New York and be premiered in the city it was shot in. I'm sure the response will be great