BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

MBunge With a relaxed, gliding surface and a jagged soul underneath, Handsome Harry is a rather…well, pleasant isn't the word to use for a tale of middle-aged female desperation and just-plain-aged male melancholy. Most of these characters are on the back end of their useful lives and they know it. Their happiness and their own futures are no longer in their own hands and they're dependent on others to an extent they don't like to admit to themselves. Everyone in this story is practically a stranger to everyone else, even spouses, lovers and one-time best friends. But what draws you into this film and carries you along is the honest humanity of people grappling with their awkward, messy and diminishing lives.Harry Sweeney (Jamey Sheridan) is a silver-haired fox. A small town electrician, he's the sort of beguiling charmer who can still make any woman over 30 smile while being guy every other man over 50 wishes he was more like. But when Harry gets a call from an old Vietnam era Navy buddy, he has to let his easy smile drop and take a journey back to the most awful moment of his life. The buddy, Thomas Kelley (Steve Buscemi), is dying and asks Harry for some help saying out of Hell. 35 years earlier, Harry, Tommy and three others almost beat a 6th friend to death after finding out he was gay. Tommy thinks he's the one who crushed the guy's hand with a metal armature and begs Harry to travel to Miami and seek forgiveness on his behalf. The trip brings Harry to the doorsteps of the other three, now ensconced in lives not anywhere as comfortable as they seem. Rheems (John Savage) has had his manhood and his family fall to ashes. Porter (Aidan Quinn) has a knot of anger and self-loathing in his heart that hasn't loosed with the passing years. Gebhardt (Titus Welliver) has made himself into his best idea of a man, only to fall into a trap from which he can escape only by destroying everything good in his heart. And their victim, David Kagan (Campbell Scott)? He's the one who seeks out Harry and forces him to be honest about himself for perhaps the first time in his life.The plot of this film isn't anything to write home about, serving only as the stage upon which Harry and others play out the little scenes of their lives, but the performances more than make up for it. Led by Jamey Sheridan's accessible torment, Steve Buscemi's despair and the simmering anger of John Savage, Aidan Quinn and Titus Welliver, you can't take your eyes off this cast. And that's not even getting into the painful loneliness of Mariann Mayberry as Rheem's wife and Karen Young as a waitress who's carried a torch for Harry for many years. Watching these actors play these roles is a marvelous experience. Campbell Scott doesn't quite make it, but that's mostly because Kagan is more a plot device bringing the movie to an end rather than a real person.Handsome Harry would have been even better if the plot had given those performances some direction and used them to build to a conclusion instead of letting one simply occur. This sort of story should be like walking up a flight of stairs, with each step taking you to a new level of drama and emotion until you reach the top, which is a culmination of every step taken before. Handsome Harry is more like taking one step up and then walking along a flat beam. You're off the ground but you never get any higher than when you started. As engrossing as these individual scenes are, they don't do enough to connect with or build upon one another. That stands out most clearly at the end, which is supposed to be emotionally crushing but isn't that much worse than what we've previously seen from Harry's friends and their own personal tortures.This isn't a feel good film, but it isn't a feel bad movie either. Handsome Harry is a motion picture that just makes you feel. And that's more than worth watching.

Paul Creeden As an older gay man of the generation portrayed in this film, I was ambivalent about it as I began to catch the plot line, but it eventually won my favor. In fact, I now think it is one of the best examples of newer gay cinema. Not that it has that much competition from adolescent WEHO fare. The deeper value of the film is the statement it makes about male aging. Regret, sadness and nostalgia haunt so many men, straight, bi or gay, as they stagger toward death. Emotionally constipated lives which have mutated into private hells of impotence and loneliness. It's all here, very well portrayed in this understated 'guy flick'. Perhaps a little too understated at times. John Savage and Campbell Scott deserve appreciation for their performances. They play the range from drunken psycho to sophisticated survivor. Well done and well written parts. Some of the other characters are a bit too sketchy. All in all, I think this is a remarkable independent film.

tempus1 of a fine, finely acted little movie. Wonder what kind of person is so petty that s/he makes snotty posts about the spelling of actors' names with attempts at snippy remarks about them 'never becoming stars until they learn to spell the name correctly'?!!? Astoundingly juvenile and asinine--and, I might add, I'm sure that JamEY Sheridan couldn't care less what people think of his 'lack of stardom' OR his name or the spelling of same. He's a fine actor who has toiled in relative obscurity so that cretins who love Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt can get their idiot fix. I suppose that any movie which is not solid car chases, noise, screaming, and bad sex scenes will bore such viewers, but why do they choose to SEE movies like this one? Go see Mission Impossible 12 or the latest idiocy with any current Hollywood 'star'--do us all a favor. LOL

ffejhawk I am a big fan of Steve Buscemi so I expected a lot out of this film, boy was I wrong, like the other reviewer I agree this felt like watching an episode of Matlock, only an episode of Matlock would probably be more entertaining. Characters were very dry and without any depth or believable emotion, like they could care less about their lines or the movie as a whole and that transfers to the viewers interest in watching it. I am not going to drone on and on as some do and I have never reviewed another title but this film I felt has a very deceiving rating and I hope this review and the other gentlemen's that also gave us an honest opinion are helpful in curving others from wasting their time on this piece of garbage. I would also like to say I am not sure what magazine that other reviewer stole that over worded tripe to explain what they saw, but if they in fact sat there and wrote with such passion for this crap they obviously need some real entertainment to use as a marker.