BootDigest
Such a frustrating disappointment
Gutsycurene
Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.
Tymon Sutton
The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.
alihandemiral
Although the storyline's "coincidental" nature seems a bit sloppy, "Arlington Road" is a decent thriller with a great climax. The film gets tense twenty minutes in and the tension does not go down until the very end. Jeff Bridges' powerhouse performance as Prof. Michael Faraday and Tim Robbins' portrayal of the suspected neighbor Oliver Lang make the film even more enjoyable.It must be one of the best conspiracy thrillers out there for the genre lovers.
juneebuggy
This was an intense little thriller, dealing with the premise that your friendly next door neighbours might also just be terrorists. Jeff Bridges plays a widowed college professor who (in a gripping opening scene) comes across a bloody 10 year old boy staggering down the middle of the street. He appears to have been in some kind of explosion and Bridges rushes him into emergency. These first 5 minutes set the tone for the rest of the movie; dark, mysterious and intense with Bridges bordering on hysteria.The boy turns out to be his neighbours kid whom he makes friends with, but while having a beer in their living room he comes across some suspicious blueprints which sets into paranoia and soon has Bridges investigating into who these people really are. They seem normal enough, but... Tim Robbins & Joan Cusack play the neighbours, -what a great choice for the bad guys, giving solid performances and very atypical for terrorists which made them even scarier.Bridges does a good job too, he has a lot of scenes without dialogue, just him running around figuring stuff out, freaking out, driving fast, yelling, he does a lot of yelling and running with big facial expressions.I will say that while the whole movie was intense there were also sections that dragged, so that the pacing felt off at times.The ending was.... unexpected to say the least. I think my exact words were "holy sh!t he ----- and that just happened, wow." Very un-Hollywood, including a scary spin regarding the angle the media takes post event. 2/6/15
edwagreen
The very ending of this film showing that evil may win out is chilling enough just to prove that this was a very well made film.Jeff Bridges was excellent as the college professor who slowly comes to see that his neighbors are terrorists. He is equally matched by Tim Robbins, with those eerie looking eyes and Joan Cusack, as the wife of Robbins. Her cold veneer shows in itself what is to become.Ironically, Bridges is so intense on his teaching of government and anti-government activities, it becomes feasible unfortunately that he himself was the mastermind to the disastrous terrorist act. No one believed him as circumstances began to pile up on the side of the bad guys.
TxMike
I had seen this movie some years back, and now have seen it again, on BluRay from my public library. I wanted to see it again mainly because it is fun to see where it is filmed, many places I am familiar with. In fact the final chase scene, supposedly in Washington D.C. and ending up in a FBI building is actually the underground parking area under One Shell Plaza in Houston, the same building I worked in for a number of years right before this was filmed. The movie is set in the areas surrounding D.C. but except for a few location shots was filmed in Houston and surrounding neighborhoods.Anyway, to the movie, a pretty interesting terrorist thriller. Jeff Bridges is professor Michael Faraday. Not many years earlier his wife, an FBI agent, had been killed in a botched raid. This heightened his interest in terrorist subjects in general. When he finds a young boy wandering down the middle of the street in his neighborhood, bleeding, he scoops him up and takes him to the hospital. That gets him to become friends with the boy's parents, neighbors he had not yet met.Those neighbors are Tim Robbins as Oliver Lang and his wife is Joan Cusack as Cheryl Lang. They seem nice enough but Michael's paranoia gets him suspicious of blueprints he finds in the Lang home, and he begins his own investigation into who these people really are.It isn't a great movie but a pretty entertaining one, Robbins and Bridges are good in their roles, as well as Cusack.SPOILERS: Michael soon finds that Oliver Lang was not his original name, but a name he took as a young adult after the childhood friend of that name was killed. Michael digs and finds that he had been convicted of crimes as a teenager and now suspected he was planning to blow up an FBI building in a terrorist plot. In the end when it appears that Michael might have thwarted the plot, he in fact became an unwitting part of it. The car he was driving actually had the bomb, and in the parking garage in the basement of the building exploded killing him and many others in the building.
