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Unfaithful (Full Screen Edition)

Unfaithful (Full Screen Edition)

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Typical Lyne
Review: I found nothing new, inventive or interesting here. The performances of Gere and Lane are competent. I think everyone is overstating Lane's performance.

Adrian Lyne's films are simplistic crowdpleasers, "Lappers", as Milton Berle used to say - the punch line has to fall right in the audience's lap or they won't understand the joke.

Maybe if Lyne didn't feel the need to try to turn this story into a thriller, and let it flow as a character study, it could have amounted to something. Of course, that would take more complex writing, and why do that when it's so much easier to just hit someone in the head, get a little blood flowing, and please that "Fatal Attraction" crowd.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Where's the rest of the story?
Review: The first half was very good, steamy as is typical with an Adrian Lyne movie. However, the second half went from bad to worse. The ending was very rushed and it seemed as if someone had lost half the script, so the actors had to improvise. I have never been impressed with Diane Lane and this movie didn't change my opinion of her. Richard Gere, a wonderful actor, wasted his talents. I had expected an all around much better movie.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Academy Award nominee DIANE LANE is what makes UNFAITHFUL!
Review: Academy Award nominee DIANE LANE is what makes UNFAITHFUL such a great film. Her performance is so raw and passionate that I was amazed that she didn't win the Oscar (instead she was nominated for Best Actress). The film is very engrossing and interesting and it held my attention and had me talking afterwards. It was cool, entertaining and thought-provoking, yet it DIANE LANE that made it such a great and memorable film. The DVD is great! With tons of extras that are both quality and quantity. One day this will be dubbed a masterpiece. 10/10.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Unfaithful
Review: I really did enjoy this film very much. The ending was yes a bit of a shocker, but the cast was well chosen for the parts they played. And so this was a "job" well done. The film grabs your interest from the very beginning right up until the very last moment.

Diane Lane (Connie) played such a wonderful role in this film as a typical house wife, who accidently runs into Martinez in SoHo on a windy day. They continue to see one another a time or two more and the enivitable begins, the affair. I think that this film is one that many, many women will be able to relate to. Beautiful Connie, slowly her life is unraveling and I think she is beginning to feel to very, every day ordinary comfortable life that she is just perhaps too comfortable with now?

When she meets Paul, (Martinez) things suddenly change for her and quickly. She feels perhaps youth, beautiful and passion again.

I was very surprised by this ending and would have never expected it. This movie will leave you always wondering "what will really happen to this family torn apart by more than just an affair now".

If you loved Martinez's performance in this film, you must see him in the remake of "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone". Co-staring English Actress "Helen Mirren". That too was just perfection on Martinez's part.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Good acting, bad plot
Review: This movie started out great. Diane Lane and Richard Gere did fabulous jobs. I was really getting into the wonderful portrayal of how a marriage copes with infidelity, when Richard Gere goes and murders the lover, and the whole thing went downhill from there. The story became cliche and the ending was weak. Very disappointing.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Oscar nominee Diane Lane is seductive and sexy in Unfaithful
Review: Unfaithful was an extremely powerful movie and was much, much more than what i had expected when i rented the dvd. Diane Lane was the main reason i got this film out because i had heard so many good things about her performance and that she has won the Oscar nomination for best actress in the films main role. Well, the hype was true. The film is excellent and Diane is seductive, sexy and downright awesome as the films main focus. She proves here what many believed before... she is a beautiful and talented star capable of carrying a movie. Richard Gere gives very solid support to her and the films director really knows his game. An all around winner.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: GOOD PERFORMANCES IN AN IMPERFECT FILM
Review: Diane Lane is a beautiful, gifted actress of tremendous range. So I was disappointed that she would lend her considerable talents to this soft-core pornfest. Nonetheless Lane gives an edgy performance as a bored housewife who rediscovers her lost sensuality with a French gigolo/boytoy. Oliver Martinez plays the young lover who spends very little time at his stated avocation as a dealer of rare books. Richard Gere offers an excellent, heavily nuanced performance as the loving husband who responds explosively to being cuckolded. Half the film revolves around Lane and Martinez engaged in very explicit sexual romps at times simulating rape. There is certainly nothing romantic about their relationship and the steady stream of sexual violence assaults the senses at every turn. This story demands some nuance but all we get is gratuitous physicality. Add to that a simplistic and ironically unsatisfying ending in which Gere and Lane agree to "start over" thereby dismissing the psychological turmoil both have suffered, not to mention the little problem of murder. In short the performances are superb, but a little more subtlety might have made this an oscar contender.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Chilling, But a Tad Predictable
Review:

First, I have to say that I have never, ever seen a film with Diane Lane in it. Ask where I've been, but it's true. However, I am now inclined to see more of Diane Lane in her other films, because even if others might disagree, Lane was the key in making this film viewable.

Many filmmakers have tried desperatley to duplicate the succsess of the films Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction. Unconcsciouly or consciously, this film somehow takes off on that direction but the twist here is that it's the male who plays the part of the seducer, as opposed to the said films which play the female as the femme fatale. Actually, the oldest story ever told to portray males as the seducers was relayed in the bedtime story Red Riding Hood. Unfaithful may have taken on that theme.

Olivier Martinez manages to deliver a decent portrayal of the book collector who presumably lives alone in New York City. Diane Lane's character, the bored (presumably) New Jersey housewife, encounters his character and begins an unexpected affair.

What interested me and what kept me watching this film is how Diane Lane's character tried to get out of the affair, and the last 30 minutes of the film will have you see Richard Gere's character blowing up Martinez's character into smithereens. Those were the predictable moments, but you just want to see more and find out what actually IS going to happen to the married couple.

The DVD itself has lots of treats. If it weren't for the special features, I highly doubt that I would've purchased this DVD. I loved the interviews with the cast. See Diane Lane's and see how nervous she is when she talks about playing the part of a cheating wife.

The alternate endings are quite interesting, as is with all other DVDs with the same feature, but personally I liked the ending in the film itself.

I managed to make a review without giving out too much information, but if you're a die hard Richard Gere fan, then add this to your collection.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Would've been better if more ambiguous... in some places.
Review: Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002)

Adrian Lyne (Jacob's Ladder) returns to the world he most likes to occupy, adding yet another tale of sexual immorality to the same quiver already occupied by Nine and a Half Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal, and Lolita. As with all the other films in that collection, Unfaithful ultimately conceals a deep conservatism under the libertine exterior, which is much of the "something's wrong, but I can't put my finger on it" feeling that often mars Lyne's work.

The story is nothing out of the ordinary; the Sumners, Edward (Richard Gere) and Connie (Diane Lane) have a usual suburban marriage, stable and boring. Connie, by chance, meets the dashing Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez, recently seen in Before Night Falls), who finds her attractive, pursues her, and ultimately lures her into an extramarital affair, and everything goes downhill from there.

It's not that what's been done before can't make for a good movie (Lyne's done it himself in Jacob's Ladder), and it's not that there aren't excellent stretches in this film. But upon reflection it does become a rather pedestrian piece of work. The first half of the film is paced far too slowly for this type of thriller, and a very, very badly cut last scene leaves the outcome of the film far too ambiguous (thankfully, the full scene is included in the deleted scenes section of the DVD). In between the film works quite well; the climax comes surprisingly early on, and unlike many recent films where that's the case, Unfaithful manages to keep the suspense going afterwards, as the lives of the characters spiral out of control in the aftermath of said climax. I just wish the first sixty and last five minutes had been handled better. ** ½

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Unrealistic and silly
Review: The key problem with this film is that we really have no idea why the Diane Lane character commits adultery. Others say she portrays a bored housewife, but that surely isn't the way she portrays the character in the film ... in the film she seems quite happy at home, and there isn't really any sense of discontentment or boredom. What we have here, then, is an adultery that just, well, happens because it's there. That really doesn't work, and from there the whole film unravels. It is so unrealistic in its portrayal of this serious subject matter that it borders on silly. People have affairs for a reason .. mostly not for no reason. In addition, there was just too much sex in the film -- too much gratuitous sex. It seems that the director was trying to say "she did it for the sex", but it still seems gratuitous. It also seems to defy reality ... in reality, most affairs committed by women are done for emotional reasons, whereas men's affairs are often done for sexual reasons. Therefore, if Diane Lane's character is having her adulterous affair for sexual reasons (as the film suggests), that is, yet again, another step away from reality. The reality is that most women don't cheat unless there are emotional problems with their husbands ... and here again the film shows us none of this. In all, a weak portrayal of a difficult but important subject matter.


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