User Reviews

A Murder of Crows is a very good film that has a good cast which includes Cuba Gooding Jr., Tom Berenger, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Eric Stoltz, Mark Pellegrino, Ashley Laurence, Carmen Argenziano, Doug Wert, Nate Adams, Jeremiah Black, Derek Broes, Adrian Colon, and Gaelle Comparat! The acting by all of these actors is very good. Gooding Jr. , Berenger, Jean-Baptiste, and Stoltz are really excellent in this film. I thought that they performed good. Pellegrine has a terrific performance in this film! It maybe his best! The thrills is really good and some of it is surprising. The movie is filmed very good. The music is good. The only downfall is the scene sex and nudity scenes which I thought brought the excitement of the film down a few stars but however, the film is quite interesting and the movie really keeps you going until the end. This is a very good and thrilling film. If you like Tom Berenger, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Eric Stoltz, Mark Pellegrino, Ashley Laurence, the rest of the cast in the film, Action, Thrillers, Crime, Dramas, and interesting films then I strongly recommend you to see this film today!

Narration in movies can be tricky. Sometimes they're practically a requirement, especially if the plot is convoluted or the prose style ornate, as in Raymond Chandler's work. How could we survive without Philip Marlowe's voice-over telling us that "her hair was the color of gold in old paintings"?

Just as often, narrations are a crutch, as they are here, telling us things that an Old Master like Hitchcock would have used imagination and skill to tell us visually. Not only is this narrative sometimes pointless but it varies in tone, as if coming from different characters instead of just Cuba Gooding Jr.'s fugitive lawyer. "There's an old saying: Money talks. The only thing it ever said to me was good-bye." Not bad. (Echoes of Philip Marlowe there.) But then again it sounds sometimes pompous. "Quite simply, the book was perfect." No kidding?

What happens in this murder mystery, quite simply put, is that Cuba Gooding Jr. is a disbarred lawyer who is framed for multiple killings of other lawyers. He's pretty bitter about his disbarment, after all. And he IS guilty of something. He comes into possession of a smashing murder novel written by a recent acquaintance, a wheezing old man with no family. When he's told that the old fellow has died of a heart attack, Gooding quite simply appropriates the manuscript, copies it, adds his name as author, and destroys the original. That's known as "plagiarism." The novel turns out to be an exact description of five genuine murders, right down to details that only the police and the killer himself could have known. The story, and Gooding's suppose authorship, attracts police attention. The pursuit is on.

Well, Gooding's narrative may sometimes become a little precious but at bottom, quite simply put, he's pretty dumb, even for an attorney. The decrepit old man, who looks suspiciously made-up from the beginning, calls himself Christopher Marlowe. Gooding doesn't even blink, and I suppose there are people named Christopher Marlowe wandering innocently around, even if they aren't Shakespeare's contemporaries. But when a lone detective tells him about the dilapidated dude's death and calls himself Goethe, maybe a red flag should have gone up.

The location shooting, around New Orleans, is nice but judging from this film it's inhabited largely by people who can't act well. Tom Berenger has a relatively small role as a real detective and does as well as he can with it. Eric Stoltz, never a human dynamo, probably gives the best performance in the movie as a decadent Southern aristocrat.

Gooding himself, who was fine in "Jerry McGuire" is an embarrassment here. His most notable achievement is sprinting down a New Orleans street with two cop cars in pursuit. No one else distinguishes himself or herself, though Marianne Jean-Baptiste carries her weight as a friendly and principled lawyer, and Mark Pellegrino is creepy enough to pass as a professor, never mind a serial killer. He has a face that resonates with Crispin Glover's, for what it's worth, and it's probably worth a lot to an informed movie freak.

The direction, quite simply, can be described as "pedestrian." We see a scene of passion on the staircase. A man sweeps a half-naked woman up in his arms and carries her up to her room. How many times have you seen a dissolve into the camera following a trail of discarded garments slowly up to the woman's bed? Don't fib, now. But, actually, there's a surprise at the end of this shot -- because there is nobody in the bed! A cut gives us a distant shot of the standard movie kind of human coupling: they're both naked, he has her pinned against the wall, and her legs are around his hips. I'm not sure anyone really DOES something as uncomfortable as that but it's become a movie convention, like the thumbs up/ thumbs down gesture in Roman amphitheaters, which the Romans never did.

Well, why go on? The sad thing is that it's kind of a neat idea -- framing a despised lawyer this way, even if you do drag in Faust. Simply put, though, it's too bad it wasn't better done.

This was an entertaining, slight film, to watch on TV on a Friday night. The film is interesting, with good performances from Cuba Gooding Jr as a lawyer-turned-novelist and Mark Pellegrino as the man who has framed / is framing him. Don't expect to have all loose ends tied up - a potentially good and interesting angle, a link between Mark Pellegrino and Eric Scholtz (Thurman Parks III, the guilty scumbag, whom the Cuba Gooding character fails to defend) is hinted at but never explored. This film is a bit like an extended Misomer Murders episode or an early-ish Agatha Christie film- don't expect any realistic crafting of crime. Expect only to be entertained, and you might be surprised!

The director certainly wasn't the reason why I gave this movie a try, because I must say that I've never heard of the man before. Still, that doesn't mean he can't make a good movie of course. Many famous directors once started their careers when their name was still unknown, so why wouldn't this man be able to make an excellent movie? And I'm already used to watch movies that don't seem to appeal to a great audience for different reasons, so in the end I went for it and hoped for the best...

After Lawson Russell gets disbarred as a lawyer for not defending one of his clients the way he should - he knows the man is guilty and his conscience forbids him to keep the man out of jail - he will write a book about his experiences. But the work doesn't progress at all, he doesn't even get started. With his publisher on his back, he doesn't really know what to do. And that's when he meets an old man for the first time. They get along well and when the man asks Russell to read the manuscript of a book that he has been writing, Russell is blown away by it. He is completely struck by the genius of the story and wishes he had written it himself. When he wants to return it, he finds out that the man has just died and then he comes up with an idea that will change his life: he will have the book published under his own name and will not tell anybody that he isn't the original author. The book is an instant best-seller, but than all good fortune turns against him. He gets arrested for the true life murders of the five lawyers in his book and has to try to prove that he is innocent, which is almost impossible because he has burned all evidence of what he did...

As a story this certainly isn't awful. Although I can't really see it as an original or strong movie, it is enjoyable and entertaining enough to spend 1.5 hours on it. I guess in the end it is Cuba Gooding Jr. who really makes it worth watching. It's nice to finally see him in a leading role and he gets away with it pretty well. But it also has to be said that he can never make you forget about the weak plot twists in the movie.

In the end this movie has too many weaknesses and looks too much like the average courtroom thriller, but even though this isn't the best thriller ever, I know worse ways of spending my time. I'm certainly not saying that it is a masterpiece, but in my opinion it still deserves a rating of 6.5/10.

I found this movie to be delightfully original (although a few parts were predictable) and it became more interesting and suspenseful as the plot developed.

Its strength was in the acting and originality, and its weakness was in the non-development or quick-development of some of the main characters, Tom Beranger and Carmen Argenziano's specifically.

The movie seemed to be rushed near the end, and could have been better developed as the plot thickened.

SPOILER: just a couple points. I felt that Cuba Gooding's character should have disguised himself after escaping the first time. And why was Tom Beranger at the house of Mark Pellinger?

Watched this movie because it featured Tom Berenger only to find out he only had a supporting role. He should have bypassed this one. The plot is not only bizarre it is quite unrealistic. If one believes that every thing is preordained, then that is the only way the plot would have worked, that the characters had no control over their lives. It begins absurdly. No attorney would ever do what Gooding did - sell out his client, no matter how heinous the client is. A client places his or her trust in the attorney and it is unconscionable for an attorney to violate that trust unless the client reveals to the attorney he is going to commit a crime. Gooding was framed in the story. The frame would only work if Gooding decided to assume authorship of the manuscript of the "dead" man. Many people would not have done that so why would anyone go to all the effort of writing the book on the tenuous assumption that Gooding would assume authorship and in the process destroy the original manuscript? Another example was when Gooding picked up the automatic that the murderer had used to kill Beringer. The script at that point had the killer look at Gooding and say you are holding the gun, implying that Gooding's fingerprints were on the gun. What the screen writer forgot was that Gooding had been a good defense attorney and thus would have known that his hands had no gun powder residue on them but that the killer had gun powder residue from the automatic on his hands. Gooding would have gone free but instead the script had him kill the villain which put gun powder residue on Gooding's hands. With that type of evidence it was most unrealistic to expect that a jury would have acquitted Gooding. Gooding seemed more often than not to mouth his dialog. He was anything but convincing in this role. They should have left this movie in the can.