Beanbioca
As Good As It Gets
Intcatinfo
A Masterpiece!
Kirandeep Yoder
The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.
Raymond Sierra
The film may be flawed, but its message is not.
ma-cortes
The picture is set in a little town from North Wales, where a vagrant named Tin man(Om Puri) is wrongly framed of murdering. Years later, a newcomer local policeman(Ioan Gruffud) investigates the deeds .When appears a local woman named Tina Trent(Susan Lynch) just returned, along with her daughter(Emmy Rossum) in the little place. The daughter bears a remarkable resemblance with the disappeared girl. As suspects are Marcus(Paddy Considine)and his friend(Richard Coyle). The policeman is helped by the local barber(Robert Pugh), killing girl's father, and the Tin man.This agreeable movie displays suspense, thrills, Welsh costumes, mystery and enjoyable performances. Main casting is frankly well, with actors today making American career, such as Ioan Gruffud (Arthur) as intelligent local policeman, Emmy Rossum(Phantom of Opera) in a double role as shy adolescent and Susan Lynch as attractive mother. Furthermore, excellent secondary cast as the nasties Paddy Considine and Richard Coyle . Glamorous cinematography by Richard Greatex(Flawless, Detonator,Chaos, A knight's tale). Atmospheric musical score by Dario Marianelli(V for vendetta, Brothers Grimm, Shooting dogs, Pride and prejudice). The motion picture is well directed by Philippe Cousins in his first and only movie, though previously won a Bafta prize for TV. Rating : Acceptable and passable.
schogger13
This movie unjustly suffers mostly from clichés heaped upon it.It's a Welsh Twin Peaks parody, they say. Too Welsh to be funny - not enough Twin Peaks to work in the end.In short: This movie is a victim of false expectations.Yes, there are certain similarities if one spends the whole time comparing, but that does this movie great injustice. The few 'blatant' takes on Welsh culture clichés take NOTHING away from its positive charme - except for nit-picking Welsh viewers, perhaps. To 'foreign' viewers it's a convincing fresco of provincial life, as well as a Chabrol movie seems to non-French viewers. The Twin Peaks connection exists only on a formalistic plane.Call me stupid, but I feel that this has a far more honest and less pretentious appeal than said cult hyper-soap. Give it a chance. It's more than the sum of your pre-conceptions.
* Schogger13
bob the moo
Jennifer is a young girl who wins the beauty contest in her local town. That night she runs out of petrol and a kindly tramp goes to get help. While away two young men start bothering Jen and kill her by accident. They take the body and frame the tramp - who gets life. 14 years later Nicky is brought to the village by her mother and startles the locals by being the spitting image of Nicky (despite being born the year after her death).I watched this as I always believe in giving a chance to British films - no matter how poorly they were delivered or received. I didn't know much about the film and came to it with no real expectations or preconceptions. The plot seems to be want to be a quirky paranormal mystery of sorts but it is only slightly successful. As a mystery it really needed to have more emotion to it; threads that had potential were poorly dealt with; although the film does quite well towards the end generally it isn't really good enough to hold it all together.The lack of character is another big fault - the film tries too hard to have side characters who are quirky and weird, and neglects to give the main characters the reality and emotional buy-in that I needed to be able to care. It has been said before, but it does seem to be trying to turn the village into a sort of Welsh Twin Peaks. Even the thread that would have been easiest to draw human drama out of (Tin Man's freedom) is not done very well and the pain it causes is only hinted at. The cast are sort of left drifting without the scripted characters to work with. Rossum is very cute but doesn't seem to know what to do with herself. Considine hams up to no great effect even if Coyle shows a good range. Pugh and Puri are both good actors and their meetings should have been much better, as it is neither is that well served.Overall this is worth watching but really it doesn't work well enough to justify seeing again. At it's core is an interesting story but one that it fails to do anything interesting with. It constantly suggests more interesting threads that it doesn't follow and comes off as self-consciously quirky and dark - to the detriment of the characters, story and film as a whole.
sburnett
My friends and I laughed from start to finish with this superb, witty black comedy - the many original characters were well played, yes there were a couple of holes in the plot (how do you escape from the boot of a centrally locked car?) but, hey, I went to be entertained and I was.We saw this at the Welsh Film Festival - why on earth has it not yet been distributed? We want to see it again to remind ourselves of all those great one-liners.