Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Dotbankey A lot of fun.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

seeker-26912 I loved this film. Found it late, but good is good no matter when it turns up. Acting is top notch, and I like the story-line too. Don't agree with those who think it's "soppy". It is sad, true, and engaging. I was drawn into Caine's lost emotional world. Pauline is the lamp that lights his way. I didn't want it to end when it did. Life is often untidy, and difficult to understand, which made it believable.

jonathan edelstein the point of the film is that isolation can take place at any stage in our lives, at 25 or at 85. whatever their age, people share the same desire for company and for fulfillment, and when these vanish, we wither and vanish. this statement is the genius of the film, a fact which the film critics seem to have missed altogether. reading the reviews, you get the impression that they have not absorbed the film or analyzed it in any useful way. they repeat each other's phrases. there is no independent thought, no intellect or critical faculty applied by any of them. one critic did not even bother to watch the film (he says she is a ballet teacher). the biggest problem with the film, i would say, is its audience. the best reviews are found in the comments, which are made by amateurs.

jimmc_69 OK, first and foremost I think the best comparison is the Notebook on Steroids. Unlike the Notebook I like the real life characters and family struggles, but you have to drop the creepy old man philosophy. So many people are obsessed with old man, young girl "Daddy" complex analogies. What some of the reviews are missing is the true love Michael Caines character had for his wife, and how well he portrayed it. Hans Zimmer music was spot on and the transitions were amazing! I only gave it an 8 because of the ending. My personal opinion is they did such a good job building the characters that the ending fell a little flat. Other than that I highly recommend this movie. You will love it if you have an open mind, and leave your personal issues and opinions behind.

rooee Sandra Nettelbeck's zombified film, based upon the French novel La Douceur Assassine, ostensibly opens where Michael Haneke's Amour ended. But while Haneke's film sought to challenge our principles and provoke topical debate, Nettelbeck's is more likely to challenge the patience and provoke irritation in all but the most undemanding. The dialogue is trite, the relational dynamics are soapy, and the tone is sentimental.Matthew Morgan (Michael Caine) has just put his wife (Jane Alexander) to eternal sleep. He's condemned to shuffling around his plush Parisian apartment, now an echoing mausoleum, until such a time that he plucks up the courage to meet his wife in the thereafter. But his dwindling existence is suddenly electrified when he's hit upon (or, contrives to be hit upon) by a young dance instructor named Pauline (Clémence Poésy). Her father is dead. "You remind me of my father," she tells Matthew. This gives you an idea of the sort of script we're dealing with.The essential premise, which wavers between faintly creepy and screw-faced baffling, wouldn't be such a problem if there were deeper layers of drama underneath. But it's all surface. Potentially difficult issues – e.g. assisted suicide – are brushed against gently, while others are glossed over entirely – e.g. the dubious sexual energy between lonely old Matthew and daddy's little princess Pauline. And this is before Matthew's vile children (Justin Kirk and Gillian Anderson) turn up to do some shopping and tell their dad he's selfish. It's a film world where characters are seemingly more interested in soap operatics than behaving like recognisable human beings; and where men and women relate like alien species.Michael Caine is suitably bumbling and shell-shocked in the title role, even though, playing an American, he adopts a bizarre accent that prances across most of the Western hemisphere, often in the course of a single line. Poésy is adorable; except, beyond the basic knowledge of her own bereavement, we never truly understand what draws her so powerfully to Matthew, let alone why she sidles up to his hospital bed in a see-through top. Anderson provides a brief burst of energy, but it's a cameo really. The heavy lifting is left to Kirk, and it's a charmless delivery of a charmless character."It wasn't supposed to be like this!" cries Matthew. Another clunker of a line from a screenplay blandified to oblivion. No alarms and no surprises; the surreal, vanishing point horror that is spousal grief is rendered as hazy anaesthesia, where the senses are dulled until some younger model comes along to reawaken them. The sequences where Matthew relives conversations with his wife are presumably meant to represent reflective recollection, but I couldn't help wondering if they might be born of guilt for burying his face in Pauline's boobs while he wept for his loss.The cinematography is a watercolour array of picture postcards depicting landmark Paris and quaint surrounding countryside, scored to trickling piano texture that doesn't so much complement the drama as provide a marshmallow mattress topper.A film with a geriatric theme needn't be geriatric in pace and tone. It patronises the very people whose plight it seeks to illuminate. How about some psychological insight? Some effort to chart this melancholy territory? Okay, we see Matthew's desire to emerge from his malaise. But what does that malaise really look like? Feel like? By the end we're none the wiser, and one is left concluding that the film simply isn't trying hard enough on any level.