"For all its jerry-built structure, Lipský's film excels itself as an astonishing achievement of visual innovation. The titular Adele is a gigantic triffid, whose human-like maw is concretized by Jan Svankmajer's cutting-edge stop-motion animation. A jaw-dropping face-changing (plus paunch-eliminating) process that stops short of entering the uncanny valley, and manifold variegated filters, quaint iris shots, zany cel animation, appealing animatronics (operating on those sentient vines), etc. The film is a rich seam of brainwaves from both the prop-and-gizmo and special effect sections, a laudable tradition of Czechoslovakian cinema, whose surrealistic élan can be traced back to their "new wave" era of the '60s, and here Lipský's flourish surmounts the stale narrative formula and tops it off with a chase between a hot balloon and an airborne bicycle, and guess what, it is not Carter himself who takes down the villain in the finish line!"

read my full review on my blog: Cinema Omnivore, thanks.