Film

User reviews of this film

• goodis said...

  Posted on Aug 28 2008 08:29 Bluesdoctor, I'm sure I've never seen anyone so completely miss the point of a film as you just have. This film is undoubtedly destined to be another of those criminally ignored & underrated modern noir masterpieces like "The kill-off" and "After dark my sweet". It's all bleak existential nihilism, with a dash of fatalistic futility. And it's impossibly beautifully sad. It also has an amazing emotional resonance which is uncommon in noir. If you can't see that then you're as heartless as the abyss you're about to fall into.

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• tom nagle said...

  Posted on May 18 2008 21:15 For those of you who watched this film--did the Ethan Hawke character not know that that was his father's car which drove past him in the parking lot of the strip mall? Surely he should recognize it and realize that something was fishy because "Gloria" was supposed to work that saturday.
  Also, even if my son were a murderer and inadvertently killed my wife, I don't think I could kill him in cold blood. Could YOU?

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• Pete said...

  Posted on Jan 12 2008 04:13 The old adage - when you're in a hole stop digging - applies in spades to the Hanson brothers who contrive to solve their financial problems by robbing a mom and pop jewel store in an out of the way mall. They undoubtedly choose the wrong store at the wrong time and reap an increasingly depressing turmoil of disasters for their families coupled with heavy collateral damage to anyone vaguely in the vicinity of their outrageous actions. The movie appears painfully devoid of the post-production sexing up of the film as shot - the atmosphere seems all too real and tedious as much of suburban US is in reality. The script is clever and believable in a true lives way but, oh boy - this is a very depressing film.

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• bluesdoctor said...

  Posted on Nov 05 2007 00:24 This is “Fargo” without any of the wit, black humor, or intelligence, without any of the sexy violence: Family turns on itself for direly needed cash, setting loose the latent evil that has been festering below the surface for decades, only to implode, leaving a trail of corpses.
  Major problem: I for one didn’t give a damn about any of the characters. These are snakes, folks, cold phony little bastards who need to be run over by a train ASAP. So what if their lives go down the drain? They didn’t have lives to begin with.
  The movie chops up the time line, butchers continuity. Movies ain’t novels. They live in, are prisoners of, The Moment. Flashbacks destroy their momentum, their forward thrust, and have to be used very sparingly, as brief asides. But here, for no real good reason, other than for artsy-fartsy self-conscious self-indulgence, the movie hops around time, intrusively changing POV, from character to character, instead of interweaving their lives with any semblance of skill. We do not need titles that flash on the screen proclaiming “Andy four days earlier.”
  Too bad Marisa Tomei has been reduced to prancing around naked to get a role (nice bod, tho). A dissolute flabby old goat, Albert Finney stumbles about, mouth open as if to catch flies. Amy Ryan, so spot-on perfect in “Gone Baby Gone,” is a complete drag, a cut-out stock character, the disgruntled ex, her underutilization an indication of the director’s ineptitude. Philip Hoffman is the critics’ pet, condemned to the purgatory of minor movies such as this that the majority of Americans will never see.
  Sidney Lumet must be in his second childhood.

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