Reviews

The film plays out in two rooms of a recording studio and is very dialogue driven, feeling much more like a play than a film; if you find one-room-set movies irritating or boring, you probably wont enjoy this.

That being said, the performances of Davis and Boseman were outstanding. Boseman in particular gave a beautiful, heartfelt performance, made all the more tragic by his recent passing. The praise he has received for this role is greatly deserved, if only he were alive to hear it.

Lacking plot and just plain boring. Even Oldman and Seyfried's brilliant-as-always acting could not save it. Netflix needs to stop making these self-indulgent 2+ hour films.

It's been a long time since a film made me laugh out loud as much as this. Maybe american comedies are becoming tired? But this is a feel-good gem that had me grinning like a fool. The plot is a little fluffy, yes, but the characters are lovable and the acting is superb. If you want a good film but arent in the mood for something too serious, this is the one.

First of all, I want to say I like the concept, as well as Malkovich and Diaz's acting.

Now let's get into it. The concept is certainly unique, but at its core the plot is disappointingly familiar; a self-insert beta male pursues a manic pixie dream girl. The characters are undeveloped, one-dimensional tropes. Their dialogue and behaviour is so jarringly unnatural that it is impossible to relate to them or understand their motives.

The film throws in a lot of 'quirks' to amuse the viewer, which are ultimately irrelevant to the plot: the 'half-office', the mishearing secretary, the emotionally scarred chimpanzee. It could be said that these things were added to create a surreal atmosphere, but I argue that it would be better to create this atmosphere with good writing.

I was disappointed to be mislead by all these high ratings, but this is sadly another example of an artsy film praised by pseudo-intellectuals.

So many film-makers try to be dark and edgy, its refreshing to watch something so sincere, with a simple plot and a heartwarming ending.

Definately some of Pheonix and Hill's best work.

The premise is very unique, and Bridges, Clooney and Spacey are fantastic. I wish they had interacted more, but it felt like the film kept jumping from one scene to the next without letting the actors really act. Also, McGregor felt like a poor casting choice to me. His comedic delivery was a little off and a lot of his 'funny' lines didnt land quite right, which brought down the energy of the film in my opinion.

The plot is forced, and in my opinion the lead pair have no chemistry. But realistically we dont watch films like this for the plot, we watch them for the old hollywood charm. The concept is a bit creepy, but we can forgive it that, different times and all. If you want classic campy old movie with beautiful dance scenes, here it is.

Its not a cinematic masterpiece, but if you want something a little bit cheesy thats going to leave you grinning like an idiot, look no further.

A very cinematically beautiful film with characters you just fall in love with. I won't lie, the plot is very hard to follow. If you've read the book, you can tell that miyazaki focused less on following the plot, more on making the film beautiful to watch, and as a result we are left with a story that has huge chunks missing and frankly doesn't make a lot of sense in places. But I'm not mad, because it is very, very beautiful to watch.

I love films, but Im not the pretenrious sort, so honestly I thought I would find a silent film incredibly dull and hard to focus on. But once I was invested in the plot, I was captivated. Great acting, very compelling plot. Loved it

Smart plot, and Lawrence is brilliant. But a lot of the violence/sexual violence felt gratuitous and unnecessary.

I don't even know where to start. The characters resemble the tropes you normally see written by teenagers in sub par fanfiction: Law's character is the classic quirky writer, self-insert male lead, and Portman is his manic pixie wet dream. I will refer to the other two characters as the other two, because they exist solely to round off the awkward love square that the film is centred on, and have no other attributes to speak of.

Love at first sight is a very prevalent theme in this film. You will know the characters are in love when they caress each others faces on their first meeting. This happens often.

The writers are also very liberal with 'deep and intellectual' lines such as "I love everything about you that hurts", which are unorganically shoe-horned into scenes as often as humanly possible, and usually don't make sense. I say liberal because the dialogue consists of these profound words of wisom more than, you know, actual dialogue.

I see a lot of people describe this film as 'real' and 'raw', probably because it contains a lot of crude sexual language. Its not that I'm a prude, but for a scene to be sexy you have to establish some sort of chemistry between characters. Otherwise, crude language just comes off as a poor attempt to be edgy, like a kid discovering swear words for the first time and over-using them to sound cool.

It's not often I go out of my way to write a long review like this, but this film was really, truly abysmal. I'm actually not sure if the director has ever seen two real life humans interact before.