BlazeLime
Strong and Moving!
Stevecorp
Don't listen to the negative reviews
Tobias Burrows
It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.
fred-houpt
That's the tag line on the VHS tape box...I just bought and watched this delightful film. I had seen it before and I just had to have my own copy (you'll see in almost any movie I review that I repeat this habit...and my room is now bursting with films....) You can tell that this film evolved from a stage play. It is contained and moves only within the confines of the pairs of actors that constitute the simultaneous stories. We are never distracted for a moment with something that comes across the screen that is even remotely tangential to telling these stories. Like a well written play we find ourselves absorbed into the warm human drama, feeling in our hearts time and again a sense of identification. Have we lost a loved one and mismanaged the mourning process? Have we been adolescents who just drop out of the boredom of everyday school life to play at a few hours of hooky? Do we feel frightened growing old as we watch our own children age and grow even more remote from us? Rickman handles the various plots with tenderness, giving each act, even when spliced on top of another, cutting back and forth, a sense of respect and purpose. As in films I have come to really love, this is a quiet film, stripped of pretense, special effects, artifice and overindulgence. We gain a birds eye view of the small scale turmoil of each character, without being overwhelmed, with just enough to urge us to come back for more. In the quiet of this film is an achingly beautiful theme by Michael Kamen. This is an excellent film, even though his first film, and we can only pray that Mr. Rickman finds himself in such artistic frames in the near future. A total delight.
Theo Robertson
As an actor Alan Rickman is able to pick a good script when he sees one , but as a director he fails with THE WINTER GUEST . This is a totally tedious film with no plot and consists entirely of actors standing around bedrooms or in streets or on windswept shores or sitting on buses talking about things of absolutely no importance to me . Yes the scenary is beautiful but so`s the view outside my window and who wants to spend two hours looking out their window ?
maggiepig@yahoo.com
The Winter Guest is a beautiful film, which looks at the rejuvenation of life after a death and the continuation of love and life in society. The setting is unusual but hauntingly beautiful (Scotland in winter) and the employment of some of the best acting talents of today all help to make a movie which causes a viewer to consider life and death, a reflective film beautifully done.
susandtownsend
Nothing really happens, and we don't know a lot more at the end than we did at the beginning. This is not a story, it's a bit of poetry. The actors are outstanding, the setting is mesmerizing and the direction is delightfully spare. Watch this when you are in the mood for something soft, if just a bit bristly -- like Emma's hair.
