Pluskylang Great Film overall

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

filippaberry84 I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

gintroubad This is a collection of nice looking scenes with high quality visual design and some fairly good acting. Hooray. And yet the story is ridiculous, and it just doesn't hang together. By the time you get to the clichés that serve as an ending, you'll want to slap something. The garish color and playful effects really do work as individual moments, but the story line is more a serious of dots that start to connect up and then veer into some kind of weird scribble. The waste of acting talent here is particularly odd. Annette Benning is rocking it for much of the film, until she morphs into Laurie Anderson. Downey is only in part of the third reel, and he's fairly restrained but effective. Rea has it dialed way down, to the point where there's almost nothing to it.

ben wells This is what happens when you don't get in to see the film you intended. There we were, looking at alternatives, and I say lets see this. Why? Isn't it obvious? Neil Jordan, Bruce Robinson, both awesome at what they do, Robert Downey Junior, great actor. All I can say is I have never lived picking this film down with my mate and whenever I try to say anything about his taste, he reminds me I picked this. It isn't scary, it isn't interesting, there is no suspense. Maybe Robinson was operating out of his comfort zone, but this film is truly appalling, boring, and occasionally laughably silly. If you want to see something vaguely like this, see 'Fallen' with Denzel Washington, which is much better. Stay away from this.

dave-sturm This is a movie to be watched more than listened to. Let the visuals have their way with you and you are going to have an exciting, nail-biting two hours capped with a perfect-fit ending.If you look for meaning, logical connections and perfect continuity, don't bother. It's not going to work for you. It's not that kind of movie. This is not "Silence of the Lambs" or "Se7en." It's more like Nicholas Roeg's twisted little masterpiece, "Don't Look Now." In fact, I recommend that movie to anyone (the few, the proud, the brave) who can see what a terrific movie In Dreams is.Annette Bening, who is in 90 percent of In Dreams, turns in a bravura performance (if you're reading this, Annette, give us a kiss, you ravishing hunk of woman. Speaking of dreams ... well, uh, let's not go there. Let's just say I've about worn out my copy of The Grifters). The story is simple. Bening plays a mom being driven mad by dreams put in her head by the sicko who killed her daughter. These dreams are of events in the past, things happening now and things that haven't happened yet. A lot of the movie is Bening having nervous breakdowns, each one worse than the one before. The apple-throwing sequence is brilliantly acted and shot. Incredible tension. Major props, also, to the big car and truck crash scene. Jordan puts you right there.Aidan Quinn, as her husband, doesn't have much to do but act baffled, but he's good at that. Stephen Rea, as the psychiatrist, performs the same role as the psychiatrist at the end of Psycho, tying together events from years past to what's going on now. Robert Downey Jr. plays the nutcase very well.This movie looks gorgeous — small town Massachusetts in the fall. Vivid colors you could eat with a spoon. The scene with the little boy atop the church steeple poking out of the lake is really eerie.Again, the visuals in this movie are extraordinary. In Dreams is not about something that could actually happen to real people. It's a wonderfully made adult horror movie that, compared to other horror movies, is actually restrained. Check it out.BTW, the trailer of this movie, which I watched on the DVD, is just awful. It looks like a completely different movie, and a bad one, at that.

frankjackdaw ** SOME SPOILERS ** There are a handful of directors out there - Brian De Palma is another - who believe that the way to make a convincing psychological thriller is just to steal wholesale from Psycho. Neil Jordan goes further and steals not only from De Palma's famous Carrie ending too, but also the red-obsession and drowning themes of Don't Look Now and the dripping red wallscrawl of The Shining, plus all the usual lunatic asylum clichés. He also reckons that by attaching a Roy Orbison song onto the end of the movie the effect will be as chilling as a David Lynch film, rather than just plain funny.In Dreams wants to be an intelligent and adult thriller, but like a director with obsessive-compulsive disorder, Jordan just can't help himself loading his film with meaningless clichés and nods to his favourite horror movies.The early domestic scenes are effective, as is the gut-wrenching murder which takes place a short way into the film; but once Bening is committed, the film takes a turn for the usual, and instead of being interesting, incisive or intelligent, just throws a lot of MTV tricks and regurgitated movie moments at the screen hoping that some of them will stick.By far the worst thing about the film is Robert Downey Jr., who undoes anything remaining to keep the viewer interested by his cartoonishly camp turn, and we're treated to yet another mother-obsessive lunatic with a penchant for cross-dressing.This is a good film to watch if you have an apple fetish or enjoy being untroubled by original ideas.