Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

TrueHello Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

wc1996-428-366101 This glossy, slick Hollywood homage to artsy-fartsy films is as hollow as a drum. It falls apart virtually in the beginning when the studio head asks the struggling writer who his agent is! Please! How did struggling writer's script even get into studio's heads office? Craig Lucas, the guy behind this pointless tripe, was abandoned at birth and found in a car in a parking lot in Atlanta, Georgia. Well, gee whiz, no wonder this film is such a mess - what infant could overcome such an horrific entre into the world? Everything about this film is gorgeous except the pointless plot which meanders every which way until you don't know which way is up. Oh sure it has its erotic moments and this is the dead giveaway because you realize you have been manipulated into a sexual menage a trois that would embarrass a Playboy bunny. Skip this one folks. This is pure undiluated Hollywood in all its all that glitters is gold except in this case its pure tinsel.

druben2 If you like the glitzy Hollywood never-never land of the rich and beautiful and think that a few Buddhist sayings sprinkled in make it profound then this movie is for you. There is nothing about this story that is compelling to me. Is seems to be more about showing off a multi- million dollar piece of real-estate that anything else. There is no exploration of the family life or marriage of the couple and the "love affair" between the two men is completely unbelievable and stupid. The protagonist is supposed to be so broken up about the loss of his boyfriend that he quickly falls into bed with the married man, feeling no guilt that he is hurting the wife, who he actually likes better than the husband. We are supposed to feel his grief and think that the internet exchanges of silly Buddhist sayings based on deceptions is somehow deep. Its an insult to Buddhism, implying that new age aphorisms can be picked up by the Hollywood to try to get across some kind of message in a very superficial story. The sex isn't even erotic or convincing. So, why was this movie made? Why wasn't this one nipped in the bud? Sometime I can't believe the trash that Hollywood puts out!

ArmsAndMan Craig Lucas took his comic fantasy "Prelude to a Kiss" and created an update for the internet age, a noirish exploration of the same body/soul dichotomy, but this one ends badly.By 'badly' I mean both the tragic arc of the story, and the failure to end the story in a cinematic way. What plays well on stage seems static here, wrapped up in confusion that poses as ambiguity.DVD UPDATE: the video release offers an alternate ending that is far superior to the theatrical release. Who decides these things?Regardless of a few problems with plot and direction, this is stellar work from a tremendous ensemble, and Lucas deserves high praise for the performances he draws from such singular talents. The three leads create a harmony that most movies never attempt, and for this alone the movie is a must see.

nycritic Clever, clever, clever. Craig Lucas' THE DYING GAUL turns the thriller genre blithely on its head with this trio of awful people who have little more in common than a moving, autobiographical screenplay that will receive a complacent makeover, sophisticated hypocrisy, and the pretense of friendship masking hidden agendas. Robert Sandrich is at the center of this story -- a writer who has child support to pay and is in dire need of a hit. He's written this fantastic, beautiful, evocative story that is based on his own life experience: a love story between two men that ends in the death of one of them, titled "The Dying Gaul." Jeffrey Tishop is a movie producer, and is interested... with one simple condition: it needs changing. American audiences, he says, hate gays, and will not go to the theatres to see a movie about two gay men in love. (The movie is set in the mid-90s.) Now, if Robert changes the male character -- Maurice, also the name of Robert's agent and longtime lover who has died -- into a woman, it would be perfect. Robert, understandably, is horrified: he's being asked the unthinkable, and he has his heart in this story. Jeffrey sleekly tells him, he loves the story -- and he's even shown it to Gus Van Sant (who at the time was at his peak). However, the change is necessary.Robert bolts, but succumbs to one tiny little detail: one million dollars, payable to him immediately, to which he can after this one story do whatever he chooses to -- create stories of gay men left and right, ill or healthy. Robert is in a predicament... and he sells his soul.Enter Elaine. She's a former screenwriter herself, now living the life of comfort in her Los Angeles house overlooking the sea. Jeffrey introduces her to Robert first via his screenplay, which moves her to tears (as he is deleting all 1172 instances of Maurice and changing it to Maggie). She later meets him for a night out at the movies, and she and Robert have the kind of chat that happens when two women are sharing innermost secrets. Among them is the fact that he's into internet chat and goes to a specific room in a system not unlike AOL. Curious about him -- maybe a little too much so -- she follows him into this chat room using a male identity and uncovers a little bit about him. Of course, the anonymity of internet chat makes people talk more than they should, and a later conversation between Elaine and Robert reveals something crucial, possibly hinted all throughout her marriage, but there, in front of her, typed words on a monitor.Craig Lucas discloses himself as a great orchestrator of people approaching their own realities from an oblique path in his extremely well plotted out and near perfect story. His use of Steve Reich's music is stunning, and perfectly counterpoints the plot turns, as well as sounds per se -- like when Elaine discovers her husband's secret and a hose goes off, or the shrieks of the Tishop children at the beginning, bookended by something horrible at the end. If you can overlook the one point of the story where plausibility might be put into question -- the fact that Robert would be so gullible to answer an approach as naked as the one Elaine uses masquerading as "Sean" -- "Anyone here ever lost a lover?" -- then the rest of the story which follows is a careful construction of times suspense that doesn't swallow its conceit whole. Even so, the fulcrum here, online chat, holds itself well being that at the time there was this innocence about chat rooms. I would have to believe Robert had only recently taken it up after the pain of losing Maurice and his overwhelming loneliness, since he doesn't seem to have friends or a life outside his computer and fiction. Only then could it jell in a perfect seam. (Then again, anyone who's come into the Internet for the first time does so with a sense of novelty that only progressively, after much disappointment, loses its truthfulness.) Where the story somehow loses a little of its initial punch is when Elaine takes her online act further as "Arckangel1966". But, for there to be some form of suspense, it's probably the only way to convey this progressive bull-fight between her and Robert, and the presentation is certainly pitch-perfect in letting us see both actors talking directly to the camera and hear voice-overs of what they're typing, but also letting us hear her as her male counterpart -- in this case, Maurice himself. It's suspension of disbelief that pays off.Neither of the three characters come off naked to us. I think it's a good thing because it gives their words, their actions, and even small gestures a hint of duplicity and doesn't allow anyone to come off smelling like a rose. Jeffrey, for example, states he's shown the script to Van Sant, but his eyes indicate otherwise. His attraction to Robert may be sexual, but masks the greed of having your cake and eating it too. Robert is just creepy: not a bad guy, but a little off, not above betrayal and even murder. Elaine's motives are, while understandable, more unclear. Baiting Robert with information she gets access to through a private investigator is plain ugly. In a way, she's a new kind of femme fatale -- one that under the guise of an identity can be anyone. This is one deadly threesome.Craig Lucas' THE DYING GAUL is a complex film that despite some minor flaws stemming from its online conceit digs deep into the veneer of those who seem to have it all, and those who are trying to have it all. Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, and Peter Sarsgaard are uniformly flawless in their characters and are reason enough to see this movie.