Alicia I love this movie so much

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

bela If you've never seen any of Woody Allen's movies, make sure you don't choose this turkey as your introduction to his otherwise wonderful oeuvre. The plot is a cliché taken straight out of a daytime soapie and despite a seemingly excellent leading cast, the acting is beyond wooden. Colin Farrell is reported as saying this movie took him more takes than Miami Vice. Pity they didn't take a lot more or better still, take none at all and start over. Abysmal.

ao590 So I've been on a binge of less than amazing Woody Allen films in the past few days. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Scoop and finally Cassandra's Dream. All set in London, they all suffer from essentially the same issues, but I'll focus on the last one here.The single biggest problem here is Woody Allen's most unique feature; his incredible speed. Reading the book 'Conversations with Woody Allen' confirms that most of these films were written in a rush based on a selection of single ideas, I think Cassandra's Dream in particular was written in 8-10 weeks or something. Which, of course, is incredibly impressive, but also painfully obvious after watching the film. Woody Allen is an ideas man; Cassandra's Dream is full of fantastic thoughts, plot details and nuances, but the problem is that hardly any of them are properly developed! The storyline is simply all over the place, there's so much information squeezed into this 108 minutes that you would think there wasn't a dull moment. Yet the first 20-30 establishing minutes are the furthest thing from captivating. We meet the two brothers, one too ambitious for his own good, the other a gambling addict, existing in a sort of idyllic pre-Event (in the psychoanalytical sense) bliss. But why waste so much of the film on this when we're dealing with archetypes anyway? There's so much superfluous information that adds nothing to the story that I honestly wish Allen would decrease his rate of productivity and spend more time in the writing process. Take for example the boat; a criminally under-utilised plot-detail that I would wager was kept in the script mainly for the title's sake. Then there's the story of Ian (to me, an awfully artificial Ewen McGregor) meeting his girlfriend while out on a country drive with a previous girl; again, adds nothing to the story and could've easily been hinted at without wasting screen-time. Or the backdrop of the struggling family restaurant business; I suspect this was meant to heighten the pressure on our characters, but Ian keeps repeating he doesn't care about it and his father seems understanding over his long-term plan of abandoning it; so why complicate the plot with it in the first place?Overall, all three films feel more like plays than movies; every set could've been represented on stage easily. In fact this was something I was constantly conscious of during the film, which suggests to me that it really would be a more natural fit. Unfortunately, this being a film, the character's insistence to verbalise emotions that should honestly be beyond their scope often completely shatters the illusion. Speaking of illusion, I haven't even talked about the choice of words / accents yet (I'm not a stickler for such a thing, but I have to mention Collin Farrell slips up on the accent once in an almost comical way in a supposedly dramatic scene. Then there's the 1950s vocabulary of the apparently 20 year old girl played by Scarlet Johansson in Scoop).Overall, not a great effort. I would be more understanding if I thought Allen didn't care, but it's clear he was very proud of Match Point, so I wonder why he would not invest the time into perfecting these otherwise promising scripts. The ideas are there; it's the polish that's missing.

runamokprods This is the third time Allen has made a drama dealing with the moral insanity surrounding the possibility of murder. The first - "Crimes and Misdemeanors" - is one of his very greatest films. "Match Point" made only two years before "Cassandra's Dream" was strong, if not as complex and gut-punching as "Crimes…". While critics liked this film by far the least of the three, I feel this can certainly stand at least on equal footing with "Match Point". I will concede that the conclusion is slightly underwhelming and feels rushed. But the strong performances by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell (who arguably does his best work ever here) as brothers in various financial need -- whose rich uncle will bail out if they kill someone -- make the film upsetting (in the good way) and tense. Indeed there are some terrific Hitchcockian moments in the film. Allen breaks with his normal style in interesting ways. Instead of only using source music, Philip Glass contributes a powerful and effective score. And the camera-work by Vilmos Zisgmond uses different kind of camera movement than I usually associate with Allen, including a sort of 'creeping camera' that helps to heighten the tension in a number of scenes. Make no mistake, this is more moral drama than thriller, and those expecting a thriller's pace will be frustrated. But whatever its flaws, it's an intelligent, well acted attempt to come to grips with moral responsibility in a world where money rules all.

museumofdave An oddity in the Woody Allen canon in many ways; while not a stinker, this brotherly drama listed as a thriller hardly thrills, and the suspense, while it holds the viewer to the screen is seldom intense; one watches, I think, mainly because the film is cast with some of the more interesting actors working today--Tom Wilkinson, Colin Farrell, and Ewan McGregor; the set-up is actually fairly ordinary for crime films, and one waits for director Allen to develop intensity in the situations; during the most heinous murder, for instance, little of its horror is communicated visually, leaving the viewer to wonder why one of the killers is suddenly having nightmares. Watching the film is not exactly time wasted, but I suspect you wont be rushing online to enthusiastically recommend it to a friend