Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Griff Lees Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

fwatkins-2 The story is narrated by a writer (Robert Lindsey's character) dictating it to a secretary. It is a story of damaged people, suffering intense pain in their personal lives while maintaining a facade of 'normality'. Gideon himself is an immensely successful and respected P.R. 'guru', feted by media moguls, celebrities and politicians alike. His daughter cannot forgive him for deserting her mother when she needed him most. Stella, who becomes Gideon's love interest, has lost her only child in a tragic accident. The Gideon character as played by Bill Nighy is calm and controlled in every situation with the answer to everyone's problems at his fingertips - except of course his own. His restraint and dignity make him truly enigmatic and beguiling throughout. By opening their hearts to each other the main protagonists finally find happiness, or at least peace. The film really captures the pain and torment every parent suffers in one form or another through their intense and overwhelming love for their children. Even the narrator's three year old son pops up, dumped at his doorstep by his ex-wife, the woman we fleetingly see at the end of the hallway. He then remarks 'has it come to this? She won't even speak to me any more' or words to that effect. The acting is brilliant, the direction faultless and the whole thing from start to finish totally captivating and moving.

snowgoblin How can be this simply story so touching? I kept asking this question for hours. Is it a parent-child relationship that everyone of us knows (at least from one of its sides) or is it something more? Or is it that lazy tempo that makes this movie so real? And I can't forget the totally beautiful song performed by Emily Blunt (Natasha). Bill Nighy's (Gideon) acting is perfect, too. Every scene in this film fits in it accurately and although the ending is filled with pathos, you'll have to like it. Because you want to believe that life goes that way. You have to see it and the best option is to watch it with your parents. It says things people should tell, but they don't.

noralee "Gideon's Daughter" brings to a TV film a trend that is mostly obvious in literary fiction – the middle-aged man who thinks he is the center of the universe and the whole world revolves around him, and faces some kind of break down if any of his women show a bit of independence.Written and directed by playwright Stephen Poliakoff, he mines similar territory as Cheever, Updike, Ford, Amis, Roth, etc. thrust into the center of English celebrity and political culture. The theme is even awkwardly made redundant by an odd structure of having another middle-aged man tell the tale to another pretty young woman and a mysterious kid.Here, Bill Nighy's media consultant only perceives such events as Princess Diana's death or the upcoming millennium in terms of how it affects him. In press interviews, Nighy has said that Poliakoff intentionally directed him to play the main character as "stripped" but one certainly doesn't see how this catatonic schmoozer even got to his professional pinnacle. His past and current sexual adventures certainly seem more male fantasy than anything based on his charisma of any kind.Tom Hardy, who was quite captivating as Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester in the recent Queen Elizabeth I mini-series, shows much more suitable feistiness, as a cross between Jeremy Piven's agent in "Entourage" and Bradley Whitford's canny adviser in "The West Wing."Miranda Richardson has the stereotyped role we've seen many times before of the quirky stranger (she dresses like an old hippie) from another class and lifestyle, but with a pained past with a child, who tempts him to play hooky and more. It is startlingly different for this genre that she is close to age appropriate.A creepy centerpiece, and repeating motif, is the consultant's daughter (Emily Blunt getting to show little of the passion she displayed in "My Summer of Love") singing a lovely ballad in tribute to philanderer Georges Simenon's suicidal daughter. The story is particularly weakened by not seeing more of Blunt's life when she's not being the adoring daughter.I really didn't get that a neglectful father who suddenly discovers he has paternal feelings is then to be considered "obsessive" rather than finally normal, even as she's about to leave the nest. His growing realization of his feelings is the best part of the film but a theme that all parents and grown children need to reconcile as adults-to-adults just drifts off.

gus120970 Frankly, this 'much anticipated' feature-length is all over the place, self-indulgent dialogue matched by equally indulgent performances by well known actors, highly aware they are in a 'quality drama' production. People all over Islington and Fulham nodding sagely, and the rest of us wondering what it's all meant to be about. Does Poliakoff know, or care? Early on it seems to be a weak satire on the 'era of spin' initiated by the New Labour government elected in 1997, which found its apotheosis in the risible Millennium Dome project, style without substance, and plastic style at that. Throw in the 'death of Diana' as a modular dramatic device, again used to illustrate the 'stage management' of our modern political and national life. But there is a problem. If you want to do satire you have to make it bite, particularly in the characterisation of Gideon himself, the spin meister. Bill Nighy, however, seems to wander throughout the production on valium, spending most of him staring out of windows and pondering the meaning of a song sung by his daughter. The satirical element is entirely missing from the second half, which turns into another middle class drama 'leitmotif' - the 'unconventional love story'. Realised in terms of one of those cross-class-cultural divide fantasies beloved of middle class playwrights. Toff Gideon dates a woman who works in an all night supermarket out in West London . Gideon decides to host a PR event at a nondescript Indian Restaurant. 'As if' on both counts. What is perhaps meant to be arresting and unpredictable is just patronising and unrealistic.