http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/02/03/thousand-movies-miguel-gomes-arabian-nights/
Viewed through the haze of Gomes’s film, the book emerges as a sumptuous, hyper version of the filmmaker’s previous works—above all, in the way that it offers lessons in stories that require the presence of another story: a work as an anthology. Gomes has always enjoyed combining two separate elements in a single film, and in Arabian Nights this technique is cosmically expanded. Each new story stylistically corrects or contradicts the story preceding it. (Other movies can seem so uniform, after a period of Gomes-viewing…) An index of the film’s second part, “The Desolate One,” is an exercise in genre revision: a slow western about an escaped convict on the run from police is followed by a theatrical and nocturnal court proceeding, in some kind of amphitheater, complete with genie and talking cow, which is then followed by a vérité story set in a rundown tower block.
