Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

carlmr I can't imagine how people can rate this movie so high. To start with the acting is bad, I don't know where they got these actors or if it was the directors will to make them act this way, but most soap opera actors seem to have more talent than these guys. Secondly the dialog is annoying or sometimes even funny because of the nonsense the people are talking. Yet the worst thing of all is that this movie is "artistic" in the sense that if it weren't almost 2 hours long you'd believe it was written by a high school movie club. In my opinion this movie is a pure waste of time, but see for yourself. If you watch it, try not to make the same mistake as me and hope it will get better after the first ten minutes...

Ben Parker Imagine a Hartley film with good acting; these people just make his writing sound pretentious, but I'm sure it could sound merely clever in the mouths of better actors.One thing I'll tell you about this movie is its IMDb page is misleading in several ways. The genre listing "comedy," the title and the plot point of two lads betting about making a girl fall in love with them, might indicate you're in for a fairly lightweight, fun movie; perhaps even a teen-movie. But this is no She's All That; its a talk-heavy script and the actors perform it in a ponderous but stagey manner; there's no sense that this is anything but a staged reading of a Hal Hartley script.

jtur88 I'm pretty tolerant of films that are off-beat, but really! This is the kind of film that makes one observe that the director might make some pretty good films when he grows up. The first scene gave me the expectation that in a minute or two, a curtain would come down and the audience would clap politely, and the amateur actors would leave the stage and move on to the real movie. But they just moved to other stages, where they kept on reading their lines as if they were dictating to a stenographer. Try to imagine an episode of "Twin Peaks" starring Lindsay Crouse. You got it. After 30 minutes, I switched and watched something else---then when I came back 2 hours later, another Hartley film was airing ("Amateurs")---which actually did capture my interest. Not great, but I stuck it out to the end. Too many forced bits that made me think of the Aykroyd-Hanks "Dragnet".

kgh-3 The power of the movie camera is its voyeuristic capabilities, peering in at various affairs, public and intimate, of people portrayed by actors. It is undetected by them as they go about their business. Hitchcock brought this metaphor to life in Rear Window as Jimmy Stewart peered into his neighbors' lives with his camera. There is, however, a school of film-making that breaks from this model; let's call it the nudge-nudge, wink-wink school of film-making. In this style the actors are all aware of the camera, behaving not naturally, but rather in a posed way, a way that says, "Look, I'm doing this for you, the viewer." Films in this school often feature stilted dialogue and wooden acting. If this is a style that you enjoy, then Simple Men is for you.