claudg1950

The leads are gentle and charming, without being ravishing. Dialogues and direction are ok, without being outstanding.

At times the director fell in love with his own images so some scenes stretch heavily and unnecessarily. Ten minutes less would have made for a better film.

The main problem to me is that there is no justification for what is happening: it is arriving to Earth the image of the final days of a distant star, a disaster which happened 30 years ago. Ok, so what? The image of everything in space, even at the speed of light, arrives to Earth much later.

Second irrelevant fact: The hero has the habit of finding patterns around. So what?

The film needed to establish an uncanny connection between both facts, but it failed to. In Frequency, there is an aurora borealis, and there is an amateur ham radio which is used by father and son with a 30 years interval. The Aurora alters the atmosphere and makes the signal travel in time 30 years back and forth. SciFi nonsense all right, but IT IS convincing as an explanation. No such valid explanation is in 2:22 for why our hero was selected by the stars to anticipate what is going to happen.

Comic reliefs: The hero is so irresponsible (or so suicidal) that he rides his bike snakeing at speed among cars in NY while wearing earpieces . A taxi driver stops suddenly on an intersection so he is crashed by a truck. A man just fired a shot in the crowded Grand Central, hit a person and is ready to fire again, yet the police asks him first to drop his gun. The victim is laying down bleeding but no police officer approaches.

While acting is ok, no character is able to elicit any emotion from viewers: it is standard by-the-numbers acting.

Add to this an insufferably obnoxious babbling kid who looks and sounds nothing but artificial, appearing in too many unnecessary scenes.

Top that with a couple of overacting criminals, where the guy is a drama queen and the woman is an almost invincible evil scientist, able to kill and kill (even a Secret Service agent) seemingly without anybody being capable of stopping her. As in most B action movies, here the last 20 minutes of unbeatable-villain getting away with their evild deeds are stretched beyond plausibility. Until the last minute, of course, when the heroine (who else?) kills the villain with a very believable (ha, ha) device.

When the two leads are cute and charming, the requisite undercurrent love is present, what a surprise.

Watchable if you don't have anything else.

The main problem with this series is that it doesn't decide whether it is a biopic, a soap opera or a crime-suspense series. It tries to be all of them, and it fails to a large extent. At least in the first half of the first season; I am not interested in watching much more.

Unlike other vieweres, acting seems to me to be OK. The character of Kemper is played formidably, though a little one-note. Agent Ford is also one note, though probabably on purpose. McAllany is a little too macho to be the head of an intellectual section of the FBI, but that is just my opinion.

I also find it well written, with dialogues which, at times, remind me of David Mamet in its awkward brilliance. The frequent psychobable conspires, though.

The point is that the whole subject matter and delivery is ok, but uninteresting in my view.

Mr Basso and most other actors are very convincing in their roles. Direction and writing is uniformly good. Special effects and fights are very well performed.

At least during season 1 (haven't watched S.02) this is a very enjoyable spy-action yarn.

Of course, you must realize that this is another of those unbelievable superconspiration plots, kinda "24" in 10 episodes. Do not try to find realism here, but if you suspend criticism and reasoning, the plot is assembled well enough to make for a coherent story, where all ends well and everything is explained.

Above all, it is a colossally entertaining miniseries.

The acting, the writing and the directing are very adequate; nothing more than that was necessary to set this film in an acceptable middle-of-the-road category. Acceptable, not outstanding.

I find the film slow: with the exception of the hostile TV interview, the scenes which constitute the plot were not intense enough to maintain my interest. (Can't totally blame the writers: the situation in itself is static: "she went away and she returned at the same age. This is all there is, what we do now?") There is too much Hallmark and not enough time travel.

Some viewers find repulsive (creepy) the idea of a couple with 20 years of age gap. Fine to them, but not for me. For the last 18 years I've been married to a woman 30 years my junior and we have two children. And we are reasonably happy. Either way, the age factor should not weight on the consideration of the merits of the film, which does not take a position on age-different couples. It is just the situation as it is.

All in all the movie is just OK, and very little is gained by watching it.

Howard Hawks showed an abismal lack of common sense when he stretched the irrelevant and pathetic Beverly Hillbillies segment until it represented the majority of the film. And also when he made Cooper imitate Lil' Abner and the others sound like similar caricaturesque yokels.

Evidently, Hawks didn't think country people could express any wisdom, so the script did not include any.

In addition to being illiterate, the mother is another insufferable one-note character. Elementary and obsessive religious beliefs are another irritating feature of this movie. The only redeeming element of the first, neverending and useless, 90 minutes is Joan Leslie's outstanding beauty.

Finally the film addresses what York did at war (the only logical part of the movie) but with neither depth nor appropriate development. The character, the personalities and the feelings of the soldiers on the eve of almost certain death are carefully omitted. And after decades, the war segment comes across as shameless unadultered propaganda, very appropriate only for the year this film was made.

Some works age very badly. This is one of them.

Opening: Judge Laird lets go Savich (a well known hoodlum) on a technicality. (The gangster will be relevant later). Hatcher, the detective who had caught the gangster is incensed.

Soon enough Elise, the beautiful judge's wife, shoots and kills an apparent burglar in her house. Or was him a burglar? Hatcher falls for Elise (a possible murderer), incontrollably.

A bright and balanced reviewer summarized the plot this way: "Compromised by suspicion and desire in equal measure Hatcher (John Corbett) can't keep his eyes off her. We are tugged this way and that over what sort of character Elise really is and what motivates her. John Corbett is good as the cocksure and hotheaded detective. You're going to have to pay attention carefully while offscreen characters are being mentioned so often to keep aware of where the plot is heading."

Acting is good overall, and dialogues are ok. The film works well as a Hallmark-type of crime story, with a romantic side.

SPOILER: Regrettably, the story is rooted on a flawed premise: Late in the film we learn that all the deaths involved were caused by the fact that judge Laird was corrupt. He was in Savich's payroll, so he was trying every case prosecuted against the gangster or his men, and acquitting most of them. Well, in the real world that is simply impossible. To avoid precisely that possibility, judges cannot pick their cases: they are selected randomly in a sort of lottery. Even if that were misteriously possible, the office of the DA would have noticed such irregularity long before the action in the film, and so would the detectives know.

The police force in the film carry sawed down shotguns. Besides being anachronistic, in a place where climbing stairs up and down was inevitable, those shotguns don't include straps (which would have freed a hand) so they have to carry them in a hand. Really. Steve McQueen's Josh Randall at least had a holster to carry his sawed down shotgun. Second, when O'Niel drops a metal plate to fool a bad guy the plate waves instead of falling vertically, as it should in a place with no atmosphere.

That's about all the wrong things in this otherwise excellent movie. Acting is perfect, ambient is more than appropriate, dialogs are on the mark and interest is well maintained during the whole run.

I like Luther very much. Gripping situations and Colossally Evil Bad Guys (Hitchcock said that for a film to be good, the bad guy should be really bad.) Yet, certain stories just are absurd. As someone pointed out, what Luther does with the dog's ashes in Ep 1 is ridiculous. The behaviour of Ian Reed in Ep 5 is also absurd: he betrays himself unnecessarily. He kills Zoe unnecessarily. In the middle of Ep 5 Luther instructs his colleague to return the diamonds to the police evidence storage. Which diamonds? Carrouds took the batch taken by Luther from the storage and run away. Sugarman took the diamonds from the woman's belly and also was in hiding. On Ep 6 Luther says that Reed killed Zoe with the gun with Luther's fingerprints on it; let alone killing Zoe was not planned, but worse: while shooting, Reed was NOT wearing gloves, so his prints should be on the gun superimposed over Luther's. After discovering Zoe's body, Luther runs away, thus incriminating himself. These small details detract from an otherwise very good crime series.

When I read that this was based on a real story I "knew" that it was going to be one of those dated, boring, documentaries. When the film began to run I told myself "this is going to be one of those highly talkative movies, equally dated, where not much happens at all".

Boy, was I wrong. By the minute, this film grows and grows in intensity and in the caliber of the moral values at stake. Viewers get more and more emotionally involved in the fate of this wretched fellow. Arthur Kennedy couldn't make him look any more innocent if he tried (brief, but impeccable portrait by him). Then, at the climax, the district attorney shows us that he had not just a hunch about the innocence of the accused. He shows us that he had done his job thoroughly, with unusual proffesionalism. Evidence pounds after evidence until it is very amply proven that there was more than a reasonable doubt in this case.

All in all, the film is as wonderful as the district attorney's performance.

Martin Scorsese wrote about Dead of Night: "A British classic: four tales told by four strangers mysteriously gathered in a country house, each one extremely disquieting, climaxing with a montage in which elements from all the stories converge into a crescendo of madness. Like The Uninvited, it's very playful...and then it gets under your skin."

I think Mr. Scorsese was being, as usual in him, very kind and generous. "Extremely disquieting" and "crescendo of madness" sound like too much for such a lame film. Less forgivable is that Mr. Scorsese included this between the 11 scariest films of all time, which is a gross, extravagant exaggeration. Dead of Night is listed by him neck to neck with the Exorcist, the Haunting or The shining, which are TRULY scary.

The usually likable but comedic presence of Radford and Wayne (in the golf episode based on an HG Wells short story) here detract from any remaining "scare" to be found in this film. Well, anyway, as pointed out by most viewers, the ventriloquist's, and the mirror episodes, both written by John Baines, are clearly better than the others, which is not saying too much.

I doubt this was scary even in 1945. It is entertaining to watch, but not more than that.

This odd film runs in two parallel lines. First, as an action "hitman" type film, where it succeeds only partially. The first hour is too slow for that. Typical action scenes are found only during the last twenty minutes or so, and they are not particularly impressive.

At the same time, the film intends to convey a human tragedy and depicts human emotions, not exempted from nobility. It works at times, helped by an extraordinary young actor playing a lovable boy, which builds an emotive relationship with the Executor.

The background of the plot (an evil priest runing a criminal organization) is too farfetched to be believable, but then again, "hitman" films are never believable by definition. On the other hand, a couple of stars should be awarded for originality.

All those observations notwithstanding, the movie is done carefully and well, acting is impeccable and dialogues are fluid and reasonable for the situation.

If you are not after a real "action" film but you look for something more, more emotionally involved, then you would enjoy this unusual production.

This is not Citizen Kane but it is not supposed to be. As a sci-fi film, this is perfect, in my view.

I noticed that episode one left me somehow unsatisfied. Yet I watched E02 and found it much better (or I was adapting to the show) and then E03 even better... Every now and then I could ogle Minka Kelly, Dorian was being more and more likable and Kennex was being more human... All characters were nice (even detective Paul was human at times) and I got the sensation of visiting a family.

At that point I realized I was hooked. Then I watched all episodes and found each one original and clever. Good plots and sparky dialogues. No repetitions and no visible flaws.

I read the viewers' opinions at IMDB and the sole criticism they made which sound true to me was that the world depicted is much too technologically advanced for a few decades of separation (but that is kind of a tantrum which does not detract a bit from the show).

Though (with the exception of ST) I don't watch SciFi, after watching the last episode (E13) I sincerely regretted the cancellation of this fine show.

Warning: I describe the ending.

This film is very good at what intends to be: a suspense/noir for the 21st century: violence and blood are high, but they are par to the genre.

Every actor is convincing at what they do, and direction shows no flaws to me.

As soon as we become aware that the killer of the family mentioned in the radio is not the psycho played by Madsen, spectators' radars instantly set on the right character, but the harm is not irreparable; the story stays engaging in spite of that.

If I should find a flaw to the film it is in the ending. When N. Is pointing the pistol to Mr Smith we know that this is going to end well (for N., of course): she will emerge as the sole survivor with all the money for her.

However, she knows (because it was discussed before by other characters) that pretty bad and powerful mobsters are behind Mr. Smith. And also the police would be investigating everybody. Her disappearance would be suspicious both to the police and to the mobsters. So she would need to hide the money and stay in town (not spending one cent of the booty) until everyone concludes that Mr Smith was killed by the psycho, the case is closed and the mob stops looking for the money. Yet, in the typical Hollywood fashion, she just drops the gun with her fingerprints on it...

I suspect the IMDB rating has been unfairly pushed down by people who don't like old movies, and by those who hate black and white films. But this production deserves a higher consideration than 5.5.

Players here follow the overacting rules of their time. Making an alllowance for that, all of them deliver their roles very convincingly.

The fact that no music is heard during the film adds seriousness, formality and elegance to the atmosphere. Silence is somehow surprising for being infrequent in films, but here it was a very good idea, in my view.

The script of the openings and closings by both lawyers bear too much on speeches and emotions, and too little on evidence. In fact, under the flimsy evidence the prosecution managed to gather the outcome of the trial should have been obvious: nothing was proved "beyond any reasonable doubt". Even without the last minute revelation, the defendent couldn't have been condemned by any sensible jury. In his closing argument the defender should have put more emphasis on the "reasonable doubt" side, so evident here.

Mr Mong plays whith dexterity a fantastically repulsive father who, as it is said, really did not "deserve to live". The defendant was very well cast, appropriately handsome and baby-faced. On the other hand, HB Warner is not given a chance to show his histrionic abilities: there is not one close-up of his face in the whole film. Miss Blane is beautiful.

All in all, the movie was entertaining at all times; at 65 minutes (my version) time went fast.

As a drama this has not enough drama. The whole thing would be much better suited into a daytime serial: 99% human drama and family debate. Hallmark could had done it better. I stopped watching at 56 minutes.

Hailey Joel Osment, who was so powerful in the Sixth Sense, is not convicing here. His girlfriend is another lightweight. Neither of them transmit enough force to carry the film.

People with better sense than the producers would have realized that the subject matter available (the story about "dad was gone to the past or to another dimension, maybe we could bring him back") was not enough meat for anything above 30 minutes. Maybe the film makers could have gone to the past themselves and ask for Rod Serling's help. Or better yet, they could have gone to the past and stay there, period.

In order to watch this scriptless mess you must set aside common sense. In an expressionistic way, everything is twisted to the point of absolute inverosimilitude. Reality will invariably accomodate itself to obtain a disastrous result each time, so a new try would be inevitable.

As one viewer pointed out, we have here a gun with 70 bullets, and a governmental institution for time travel's experiments THAT HAS ONE HUMAN BEING TO WORK IN IT!

Almost everybody here is as competent as the Keystone Cops. At close distance the hero lady will not stop Frank with a well timed shot; she will babble until it is too late and the bad guy took the upper hand. At larger distances she will shower gazillion bullets on the bad guy but not even one will be on target. The trooper is really really dense and clumsy, and there's this competition between Frank and the gas station guy to determine who is the more disagreeable of the two.

Two stars for the comedic elements.

On this date there are only a few reviews: one rated 2 over 10, and all others rated 1 over ten (which is the minimal rating, there is no zero). Nothing better than two.

I am convinced that Mr. Rodnunsky slept with the wife of IMDB's owner and the husband learned all of it, so he sent his goons to destroy this movie.

Don't get me wrong: this is no Citizen Kane, but as films in the unrealistic genre of car chases + giant corporate corruption go, this is quite acceptable. I have watched MANY films worse than this one.

Granted the two leading ladies were not the best actresses out there, but male actors are all correct in their roles. Without being Shakespearian, dialogues were almost always natural, or even if occassionally were not, they contained the typical melodramatic lines of the genre.

Something is very wrong here, but it is much less about the film than about the supposedly objective viewers.

This is an entertaining spy film, ony marred by the need to display British officers --pointedly, British Intelligence officers-- as dumb. These fictional Brits need to make unforgivable mistakes in order to allow the bad guy escape and escape again, and thus stretch the plot.

Then, the hero should have died twice, but he is the hero, so he won't. The bad guys also waste their chances of finishing him; they are almost as dumb as the British. As in Austin Powers films, instead of killing their enemy right away, the bad guys delay pressing the trigger.

However, one must admire Follet's ability to depict the ways in which the good guys slowly tie the noose around the villain; how they do intelligence.

To me, the worst instance of stretching the story is near the end, when Robertson's character puts a bullet on Wolf... but only one, so the German Spy manages to grab his son and threatens him again.

Nevertheless, as I said, the story is watchable.

This film is for those who think that rock music is the best (perhaps the only) type of music in the world; they should be happy because BD administrates an endless dose of that type of noise. This film is for those who long ago watched films about truck drivers (usually starring Burt Reynolds) and more recently were adept to the 60 Seconds Theft Repo Demolition type of car action movies, mixed here with some Grease romance or teen agers' musicals. Mostly for the illiterate sophomores.

Every commercial formula is here, all in the service of nothing original nor of substance.

Driving scenes are very good, which is not surprising (one star for that). Dialogues are utterly unremarkable, not surprisingly either. Emotionally connecting with any of the characters was impossible to me: nothing there.

After half an hour I couldn't take any more.

I began to watch expecting the moment of "bad acting" mentioned by other reviewers. I didn't find it. Most actors here have a sizable previous cinematic trajectory and have experience enough to handle this script.

We all now these films are sophomoric. That's the way they are intended. Pretty girls and handsome boys save the day. They have a deus ex machina, a marvelous device which defeats the bad invaders. The role model of this one (Independence day, where a genius is able to insert virus into an extraterrestrial computer system) doesn't have a more logical script than this one.

Notably, I was entertained all the time, more than I was with other, more advertised, big budget productions. Definitely watchable, taking into account the genre.

Perhaps more irritating than those paid high-rated reviews are those guys sent to defame a film. In this thread, viewers which rated 1 to 3 show a common element: abscense of foundations for their opinions, which make them so suspicious. Or maybe the critics are sincere, but people have mentally declined so much that we don't understand (or enjoy) a film unless it abounds on blood and (very expensive) action and special effects.

Complainers say acting was horrible without even mentioning seasoned and well-tested actors like Mary McCormack and Richard Schiff; (apparently some viewers think that just saying "bad" is enough to make something bad). Just watch the film and see what was so bad with the acting; I could not find it. Being enthusiastic, a more discerning viewer observed that "The two main actors in this movie give a much better performance than 99% of the actors you see in a big budget sci fi, but neither of them is really 'good looking', so this is all they get."

Many 1-to-3-raters protest that the movie screams "low budget", not realizing that the story does not need any high budget.

Disgruntled viewers claim that the screenplay was insipid, while in truth they should have said that they did not understand it. Some proclaim their own limitations: "There is basically too much talking and philosophising which gets confusing and boring"; "(the film) needed some space battles or something..."; "unintelligible dark plot lines that end in predictable nihilistic philosophical jumbles".

To be honest, the final hero-extraterrestrial dialogue is a little too philosophical, but that is somehow inevitable. On films dealing with time, the ending usually is confusing and implies a contradiction; very few time travel stories succeed in avoiding incongruencies. In Alien Code the situation is somehow worse than having a time loop, parallel times or time travel. Here we have NO time at all. Humans entered in contact with beings which perceive everything happening at the same time: timeless creatures.

And the end has to be nihilistic: If everything already happened at the same time, there is nothing we could do. For those who did not watch it, the plot resumes in two questions: "What if time weren't always linear?" and "you've done something wrong. If you could go back in time would you change what you did" (The film's answer to the first question is "yes, for some ETs isn't linear", and to the second is the nihilistic "it is not possible to change anything".)

As almost always in the Hollywood conspiratorial world, the behaviour of the powerful bad guys is ominous (except perhaps the ever silent MIB, who were intended as menacing but came across as cartoonish, cliched and comical). What is not properly explained here is why the government, the military or the dark corporation are doing what they do. They believe they are building a doomsday weapon? In the end the hero realizes it is not a gun, so why the bad guys could not realize it as well? Why the extraterrestrials weren't clear about it in their documents?

Though I find this film very very good, some may disagree with the last part. The ending felt rushed, not explained enough. While the movie introduced several complex concepts, none of them received a shockingly novel treatment. The "baldies" were excellent characters for a suspense movie, but they were not given enough screen time, or a purpose.

But these are minor flaws. Generally speaking, this is FAR better than the rating it has received.

Let's begin by stipulating that there is a germ of reality in all the madness this story narrates. Let's say that this film is not 100% a figment of the milketoasty main character's imagination.

Now spoilers begin so stop reading if you wish to be surprised later.

(1) The film begins with timid and ineffectual Bob (Slater), who is a little coo-coo: he believes is having conversations with his pet fish. Bob is despised or ignored at work so he brought a revolver to the office with the plan of killing five of his coworkers and later shooting himself, but he never gathers courage enough to go with it.

While in his cubicle, Bob grabs and loads his gun, but one round falls to the floor. Up to here we may say this was "Real" within the film.

(2) But the movie continues. Another coworker had the same idea as Bob, so while Bob is fishing the fallen bullet the other guy kills five clerks. To some extent by accident, Bob kills the killer so he becomes a hero to everybody.

(3) In the shootout, beautiful chairman's assistant Vanessa (Cuthbert) is shot and becomes quadraplegic. The chairman of the company (Macy) gives Bob an envelop destined for Vanessa. After a failed attempt of helping Vanessa commit suicide, Bob begins a romance with her. All collapses for Bob when it becomes evident that Vanessa was the chairman's mistress and when she confesses herself to be uncapable of loving anybody, including Bob. Moments later Bob's mind crumbles completely when he opens the envelope his boss had given him, where he finds a photo where Vanessa is confessing her love for the chairman.

(4) Now back to "reality". Now Bob goes to, or appears at, the office, holding the gun. Vanessa is standing next to a watercooler so evidently she was never injured at all nor she had any relationship with Bob. (Most or all of paras 2 and 3 then never happened). While ogling her, Bob receives a fatal shot from his coworker. (So the other gun was also "real", we conclude, and maybe the other guy was later regarded as a hero because he stopped Bob who, after all, was holding a loaded firearm in the offices. Irony of ironies). The film ends here anyway.

Now if Vanessa was never injured the boss never gave him any envelope to Bob, so the photo that shocked Bob into madness did not exist. In order to make this film work we need to accept that most of it was imaginary, including the envelope. (I don't know about others but I hate films consisting of a character's imagination, or dreams.) What triggered Bob's collapse, then?

The film is not funny either, but rather quite depressing.

This is a movie for kids, right? In kids' films no normal person dies. Not even the regular bad people die. They always get their desert, and the good guys always triumph in the end. Well, in that sense the script is exactly as it should be.

Now the acting: the main actor is simply formidable, absolutely believable in the exaggerated terms these films usually propose. (A very shy child, infatuated with a lovely coed and persecuted by a nasty bully, whom he will give his comeuppance before long). And the star is followed by the reminder of the cast, in a highly professional way, each one filling their role very well.

Manny Coto is a very competent screenwriter and here he shows that he can direct as well.

In conclusion: I do not understand why this film was rated so low in IMDB.

Several times during the film, both in rooms and in streets, the hero protects himself from a gazillion machine gun bursts crouching behind a wooden (probably plywood) counter, behind the door of a non-armored car and worse, behind a stretcher.

And no matter how many bullets are thrown to him, he is always peachy. Not one hits him.

The way the Big Bad Guy behaves and dies in the end is ridiculous.

In addition to those weaknesses there is the implausibility of the whole plot: the bad guys want to kill the president, so instead of hiring (and handsomely paying) a reliable sharpshooter, or finding a fanatic who could do the job out of hatred to the President, the bad guys force a guy by taking his wife and child as hostages. What could go wrong?) Yet, apart from those shortcomings, the film es decently directed and decently acted by everybody. As pure mindless entertanment, it fits the bill.