This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
The movie is shot beautifully, and recreates the sort of weird liminality of an all-inclusive resort. Mescal and Corio act well. But honestly, and perhaps this is my fault, this movie made me feel almost nothing. I expected from what I had heard from friends a supremely poignant experience.
But I was left feeling as though I had spent 1 1/2 hrs watching the first third or two-thirds of a larger work. The film is technically told entirely in flashback…
This is like a mix of Bridget Jones' Diary and Love Actually if you removed all the thoughtful, remotely subversive, or well-acted parts and just left in the bits where Bridget weirdly talks to herself and Hugh Grant dances like a moron.
The whole time I watched it I was convinced this was written and directed by an American who had seen those significantly better films and wrote this from memory. I was right. Cameron Diaz, by the way, cannot…
Great film. Pacino showed his capacity for star status here, and does an excellent job, though I think the real star of the show is Kitty Winn as Helen. A very difficult watch, and basically set the standard for depicting heroin addiction.
The grittiness and absolute dirth of optimism which marred the 70s are on full display here. I only wish the audio mix hasn’t aged so poorly (a crime shared by another favourite of mine, Orson Welles’ Chimes at Midnight).
A charming ode to the final days of the New York aristocracy in some undefined mid-century year. These kids are the Last of the Mohicans, as it were, in debutante society. The bloom is coming off the rose, and only some of them realise it, and the film is as much comedy, romance, and sort of benign mini-tragedy.
That virtually every actor remains an unknown (as they were when it was made) gives the picture the feeling of watching real…
