gavin6942 Writer Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) works during the day at an insurance company where events lead him to discover a mysterious underground society with strange suppression goals.I was not aware of this film until now (2016), and boy was I missing out. What a great blend of Kafka's real life and his world of literature that had a strong disdain for bureaucracy. At some points I was not sure where Kafka's real life ended and the illusion began. (Presumably most is fiction, but enough truth seeps through.) This film also had an excellent use of color. Most of the film, in fact, has no color at all. And when that can be done effectively, as it is here, it has a certain power that color never can. And then when the scenes have color, it means so much more than if it was there in every frame.

avrilwibert I just like Prague, what a beautiful place to photograph, how many deeply associative, almost mythical, images does one come across in Prague, castles and winding rivers and bridges and gargoyles and cobblestone squares and narrow alleys with walkway overpasses and dark old European colours. Plus I love Kafka, and anyone who holds a deep respect for Kafka will take pleasure in imagining his what his real life experiences may have been like if his real life experiences had included events analogous to those that take place in The Castle, which I have never read actually, but I think the events of the movie are taken from the events in that story. Anyway, though, Prague is beautiful and so is Kafka's writing. I've been to the Jewish quarter of Prague, Kafka's birth place, and the Jewish cemetery—it's otherworldly and the real life city now has the kind of romance in it that we usually find only in movies and novels and paintings and other forms of imagining—so, it's a wonderful place to shoot a movie.

Carson Trent Considering the fact that Franz Kafka's work seeing the light of day was a result of a broken promise, because he never wanted his work or his persona to be known to the world, and on his death bed asked a friend to burn all of his work(but which instead decided to publish it), one could consider this film a further invasion of his privacy, and in a sense a blasphemy(setting him in the middle of his own work he never wanted to be published). On the other hand the result is not as surreal and claustrophobic, in black and white, European style movie, not inflicting damage on Kafka's work, making him the lead character in the diluted adaptation of his novel "The Castle", and is in a sense a tribute to the genius of Kafka's work. There couldn't have been a better choice for the lead role, but perhaps Terry Gilliam would have been a better choice to direct.Basically if you like the work of Kafka, you will like this movie, too, as it tries to capture the claustrophobic, surreal and absurd atmosphere of Kafka's work, although missing on the depth of it.

mario-rad This is just another typical example of a director trying to look smart and then messing with something he doesn´t understand. There is no level in which this piece of cinema works. Cinematography is O.K., but that´s not even worth of a mention. Soderbergh tried to do some kind of a pamflet of Kafka´s real life, his stories (specially "The Castle" and "The Trial") and then he mixed that into a pointless film-noir scenery (even that has already been done before, only much, much better in Cronenberg´s "Naked Lunch"). Jeremi Irons is totally out-of-focus in this role, and so is the entire cast. But who can blame them, I would be too if I had to say such ridiculous and meaningless lines and dialogues as they did. I have no idea who gave the opportunity to such pathetic and below average directors like Soderbergh to visualise the lives and works of important figures of literature and art like Franz Kafka. It´s a real shame that this awful movie even exists. (Steven Soderbergh obviously did not learn his low capabilities of understanding the art, ´cause years after "Kafka" he did even worse blasphemy then this one and completely ruined and simplified Stanislaw Lem´s sci-fi master piece "Solaris")