Reviews

This is not for everyone. A psychological torture is not for all. Yes, it is a damning brain grill in high quality status. Basically a plot of a triangle love affair that ends in a disaster which poses so many enigmatic questions. Whether Lucy's dark history did contribute to it all? Who is Teiji anyway? What were his background and motives? You will still be trying to figure out all these questions long after you left the theater.

Needless to say Alicia has done yet another terrific and unforgettable role to her credit. She ably takes us to Lucy's disturbed inner psycho. She cleverly portrays the innocence psyche that Lucy is, yet showing the hallucinated vengeance Lucy so dearly wish upon Teiji and Lily, quite ably demonstrating how traumatic it is to be betrayed by your lover and friend.

Cant say the same for Naoli who cast Teiji as he is a bit overacting and stiff right throughout. However Riley (Lily) is quite natural and great in her role, in few occasions even at par with the quality of Alicia's acting.

Cinematography is one of the best I saw in a while with the right balance of light and dark tones weaved in to the nature of story. Brilliant!

You may feel it drags, boring but worthwhile to sit tight until the end so you will get the sense of a lead to the enigma that had been haunting right from the start. Worth the while!!

The Guilty could have been an exceptional movie if it was not for few faulty pieces in the plot. Hence my 8 out of 10 or else it would've been 10/10.

Let's take a look at the positive side first.

This movie which runs nearly for one and half hours is entirely shot just inside two rooms. And 90% of the entire movie time is centered on the main character Asger, the Police emergency call center operator distinctly portrayed by Jakob Cedergren. Just combine these two scenarios and imagine how boring it could be to sit and watch an 85 minute movie? Pretty horrendous, right? But it is not! Instead, you will be glued on to the screen, oblivious of where you are or who sits next to you. The movie tells a flawless story, takes you to crime scenes, offenders, culprits, victims and all, but you see all those things on Asger's eyes, mouth, chins or in his body movements and in his words only. You are actually deeply engrossed in a crime scenario, created by your own imaginations! Such is the power of cinematic techniques used by this outstanding director, Gustav Moller. The power of dialogues and the quality of sound recording enrich the fabric of the plot and complement the acting skills of Jakob to do a great job. The other surprisingly noteworthy characteristic is that the movie does not have any kind of background music. It's just the sound of eternal phones ringing, dial tones, connecting noises, human voices and noise of gestures and expressions that play the role of music. Yet so amazingly, you don't feel the void of music until you get back home and rewind your memories!

Now the negatives! The plausibility of the plot is damaged at few places. As a low pay grade call center operator, how Asger takes law on to his hands and use one of his drunkard colleague to do unlawful home intrusions without being objected by his colleagues is a huge dent on the validity of the story line. Except for Dispatch Officer who tells off Asger to stop crossing the line, anybody else seems to care less about what he does inside a room with all curtains down! The other unbelievable thing is how Iben keeps talking to Asger within a very disturbing kidnap scenario or even why Michael wants to keep a conversation going on with a Police officer. And Asger's confession in the end that he killed a person seems quite odd because Police dont hire people with criminal allegations.

However, The Guilty is an exceptional movie enriched with advanced technical skills blended with clever movie making talents. Gustav Moller takes us on this really extraordinary yet worthwhile journey filled with suspense without an iota of boredom.

I went to see this movie with high hopes but feeling totally betrayed. This movie is full of absolutely unbelievable incidents. And ridiculously PC crap! A woman, Adja gets caught at an Icelandic port trying to enter Canada on a forged passport. She was then sent to a refugee camp. And the drama unfolds when she meets Lara, the immigration Officer who caught her was looking for her lost son. Lara couldn't pay the rent (totally unbelievable with her job) and gets booted out and starts sleeping in her car with the little son. Adja finds the son and then they become friends and thereafter Lara was invited to sleep in her refugee camp room (again unbelievable, how outsiders can have access to refugee camps!). Adja looks after the kid when Lara works and she even takes the biggest risk in her life by claiming she is a drug user to safeguard Lara who actually used the stuff. Here is a woman who is eagerly waiting to get cleared from illegal immigration looking forward to be with her daughter and she claims she is a drug user!! Only a ghost of Jesus Christ could do it!! I won't waste anymore of your time on this, the whole movie is crap, made to appease the PC mad world and nothing else.

The worst damage to the movie is done by the totally unbelievable events and things appear in the storyline. It should be the eighth wonder in the world for a person whose leg is so damaged to walk hundreds of miles in freezing snow and finally reach a human settlement. Funnily, they find all the necessary medicine, moonboots, surgical equipment and all that in the plane or wasted snow land! And food never seemed to be a problem to survive weeks while they start fires in a flicker in that freezing icy land ! Ha…ha… How Kate kills a snow tiger with a flare gun like an Olympian best shot is next to the ninth wonder! How childish if the director thought we were gonna believe all that crap?

Only silver lining- the music of Ramin Djawadi that was so soothing and beautiful. The cadence between the piano and cellos so amazingly captures the fluttering melancholy of lonely and isolated souls struggling to survive. And the cinematography is equally beautiful catching few of the best snow landscape shots I've ever seen in a movie. Editing is smart and credible too.

Unfortunately totally wasted talents from Kate and Idris, both excellent actors who struggle to give the best but fail miserably due to a weak storyline and a screenplay.

This crap movie does not have a soul in the first place. Its a dumb celluloid piece! There is no sensible story or acting but welded celluloid pieces about some disoriented people wandering not knowing who lead their own lives. There are worst scenes such as Elio's intimate scene with a peach - so disgusting, yuck! What does the movie director expect us to do with that miserable scene?? PC gone mad if you criticized this cacophony. Total waste of time and money!

I am still trying to pick up the pieces of my brain after watching this so called 'epic movie ever' with so many dumb accolades! I am still at a loss to figure out what the heck Nolan was trying to tell us? Is it the 'heroic work' of allied troops; which actually to me, were lamely waiting for their death? Or was it about just one single heroic job of a RAF pilot or two? Or just about a story of some crap Nazi pilots, all of whom just got shot by one or two RAF planes who were running even without a drop of fuel? Some pilots can kill even when they are gliding so I guess miracles happen, doesn't it?? And the pain of racing your brain in between millions of scenes just nearly assassinate you! Why did Nolan think he was creating climax by swapping a soup of 3 main background scenes over and over, so quickly, till the end where that juggling-in-between scene job exhausts you to near death? It totally kills the smooth flow of any story telling if there was any! I don't have anything to comment about acting because there was no acting of any significance. All the actors were like monuments. And what was that guy Fionn was doing as Tommy, I don't have heck of an idea! There was nothing to comment about music either which I did fairly OK with my strong ear plugs. Editing was the mantra for Nolan it seems and probably is much better than the director's job I must say.

In short, just waste few dollars and hours and get a boring dull story with an endless cacophony!

A good French romantic comedy with an easy go. It is a story of a middle aged woman Isabelle, a divorcée who seeks a meaningful love with a spicy intimate relationship. She meets and have short relationships with couple of men but ended up only with illusion. Isabelle is just a woman like any other, who needs love care and sex in a normal manner. But the men she meets with quite different personas are huge mismatches to her love expectations and desires. Juliette Binoche is the centerfold of this movie, taking command of her character Isabelle rendering great stamina to the character. There is no doubt about Binoche's awesome acting talents and beauty and she keeps her legend in the movie by giving a very vibrant intensity to Isabelle's character. She laughs, she cries, she suffers, she daydreams, she's angry, she fights - all these moments are exceptionally portrayed by Binoche like a fish swimming in the water. All men portrayed are skilled actors and have done justice to their characters.

Director Claire Denis does a great job. She coordinates a great screenplay with great acting and editing. She manages the opening sex scene very well in which high intimacy running wild between the couple but something is seriously missing kind of idea successfully transmitted to the audience. Denis uses close up techniques quite successfully, particularly of Isabelle's facial reflections, to display the complexity of her character. Music is appropriate and suits most of the scenes. The balance between the close-up shots with wide angles speaks a lot about a good cinematographer.

My only complaint is about the end scene where Isabelle meets the fortune teller and when he starts a pretty boring 10-15 minutes 'analysis' about her love life and the men she have had affairs with. Total waste of time and his monotonous boring voice kills half of the good mood you acquired since the beginning of the movie. Denis should have left that analysis be done by the audience, on their own way rather than narrated through a dull character.

A good one, as often as we get from the French side of the world.

I went to watch this movie in a late Sunday night so it was truly a rough night for me!

This is supposed to be a funny comedy which is not. Few women get together to have a hen's night and call a male stripper to have some fun. And the man dies in an accident in the house and all women start the normal hysterical chaos. The story is about the stupid things they do to hide the body. Anyway in the end everything become normal and even the Police forgive them for the murder, like in a banana republic, and everybody lives happily thereafter! Now you know it is a terrible story – and I am telling you its terrible acting too! I had a lot of liking towards Scarlet up to yesterday but that's gone down by almost 50% now. One more movie she acts like this, then I will never watch her movies anymore! I really didn't know the other women actors much but am horrified even at the thought of seeing them again in my life for sure. Paul Downs acting as Peter is a terrible clone of a pathetic joker and a headless chicken. You feel so disgusted about his pamper dressed clown acting!

In short, don't waste your time!

I have mixed feelings about this movie. I wish I could write a really positive comment on it, because it has a great theme of human love and kindness. But there are few flaws which really hurt the movie that would otherwise have made it a great movie.

First of all, the strength of love and kindness shown not only towards humans but also to animals is very powerfully shown. That is the strongest trademark of the movie. The immense risk taken by both wife and husband, Antonina and Jan to protect some Jews is depicted fairly strong in the story line. A powerful theme of empathy towards those hiding in the basement has worked out well. Jessica Chastain doing the role of Antonina is clearly the winner of the best character here. She lives in her character like a fish in the water and stands tall among other actors. How she handles the romantic advancements of Lutz while not antagonizing him in order to hide the secrets and safeguard the basement refugees is exemplary. Johan acting as Jan is doing a great job too. His character is a strong pillar to Antonina's character building.

However there were some flaws. Losing momentum in some scenes and characters where the flow becomes faulty and with some voids. Basically it's a problem within the script, so the script writer has not done a proper job. I also attribute those to poor editing and directing rather than to acting. Many times, particularly in the last 30 – 40 minutes, the connection between the scenes was very weak. Scenes changed quite abruptly, not linking to the next frame thus losing the momentum. For e.g. how did Jan got involved with an underground group to fight with Nazis was not clear and the sequences leading to that was not shown at all. Whether Antonina knew about it or not, is rather confusing too. Also, how some workers still remaining in the zoo amidst so much of war chaos and Nazi bombing and invasions has not been created credibly. Given the ruthlessness of Nazis, the lackluster attitude of Lutz towards Antonina and her family when he found the secrets is very questionable. And when Jan confronts Antonina with a suspicion of an affair between she and Lutz, her reactions were not credible, because she didn't really wanted to be Lutz's secret lover. Yet she doesn't tell it to Jan strong enough, except in a flash. And how the couple afforded to feed hundreds of people in a secret tunnel is a big question very badly unanswered!

Yet with all that, I find the movie a positive one.You get excellent acting by almost everyone. Needless to re-iterate how well Jessica, Johan and Daniel do their jobs. Music is serene and allure, that captures the poignant setting of the era. Cinematography is one of the best I've seen recently. The chaos of the zoo after the Nazi bombing has been captured brilliantly where the animals were running amok all over the city. Those few minutes must been a real challenge to film, with real animals, but both director Caro and cameraman Andrij have done a great job there.

It is not a great movie. It is not a perfect movie. But it is a movie that enhance and re-affirm your faith in humanity. Strengthen your belief that humans are the most valuable thing on earth. Antonina and Jan shows us that no matter what happens to their life, when it comes to saving a human life, they would do it. And they did save as many lives as they could. That is what inspires me most about this movie.

Hardly a movie is so mesmerizing to me. Hardly a movie is so gripping and captivating for most cinema goers these days I believe. The Light Between Oceans is one such movie! I did not expect it to be so absorbing when I chose to watch it while having a day off. I just thought it could be a bit boring as the story is based on a faraway light house. But at the end I was glued in to my seat spellbound by its infinite beauty and strength; quite pleasantly captivated by great acting of Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender. Particularly Alicia truly lives in the character and wouldn't let your mind roam anywhere else. She makes it so real and emotional that you feel that it's you who is inside her character. I was just thinking how lucky we are that Alicia came to this world to make us so fulfilled with her spellbinding acting! One of the best scenes displayed with utmost acting talent was the scene Tom agreeing to Isabel's plea to adopt the child, keeping the incident a secret. The facial expressions and the body language of both Tom and Isabella are so natural and intense in those few minutes, you could be frozen to your seat! Fassbender plays the role equally well too, a character well displayed with his identical razor sharp eye and intense facial expressions. He needs no extra effort to play such a complex character as he is born with such fascinating acting talents. Rachel Weiz does justice to her role well but I believe her character belongs to a younger actress to match the story. You get to see great cinematography by Arkapov in such beauty that captures spellbinding New Zealand landscape at its best. It rhymes well with the melancholic music by Desplat. Last but not least I had never watched a movie by Derek Cianfrance before but he simply has done smart work by directing this ingenious epic.

My only disappointment is towards the end of the movie, as the final scene building loses its momentum. When Tom is in remand the characters begin to lose cohesiveness a bit but it sinks further when Isabel passes away, Lucy is suddenly grown up and become a mother too, within the next five or ten minutes. That chaotic haste really smashes the beautiful rhythm so well built up throughout the movie. And the the age related make-up is totally hopeless as Tom still looks the same person even when Lucy is a mother and visits him after 25 years! However, all in all it's an engrossing cinematic experience that brings you the quality of film making and you will never regret watching such a great creation!!

It is so sad that great sublime creations like this movie didn't even get a a single nomination for Academy awards in 2016, while a synthetic junk crap raked almost all the awards. It shows what a deep stinky Hollywood political sinkhole the Academy has sunk in to now!