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Unfaithful (Full Screen Edition)

Unfaithful (Full Screen Edition)

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Olivier Martinez - Remember that name!
Review: Wow, the stars were each perfectly matched to their roles. Best sex scene in ANY movie i've ever seen -- and what a hunk Olivier martinez is. I'm just an ol' lady --but all us girls had lots of giggles reminessing the first part of this movie. The next half put you in a totally different mode --a real shocker, full of wonder as to what would happen next. At first, I was disappointed with the ending --I didn't like making up my own ending or wondering what would happen. But in seeing it a 2nd time--I realized there was only one ending. BUT I HATED SEEING MY GUY GETTING KILLED!!! i wouldn't watch that part the 2nd time. All the stars did a remarkable job with so many emotions. Richard Gere was GREAT! i've got to buy the videos and more with Mr. Martinez. Linda 804-739-2002 PM

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: two stories in one
Review: riveting action. Diane and Olivier sizzle. Rocks a woman viewer---would she be so foolish as to put herself in temptations way with a sexy young guy like Martinez. She would not have gone upstairs with him if she planned to be true to hubby. At least I don't think I could keep from being seduced if I let myself get into a secluded place with some hedonistic hunk. Interesting situation. Inevitable trouble. Next was the betrayed husbands story and the way he dealt with Martinez.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Ms. Lane, meet Mr. Oscar
Review: This hushed drama, with its reserved, pretty visual style and steamy - but relatively classy - "love" scenes is the quintessential adult escape for 2002. It spins the seductive tale of a lovely, bored housewife (Diane Lane) who falls into an affair with a mysterious stranger (Olivier Martinez) after he helps her off the street on a very windy day. The purely lustful, adulterous relationship continues until dear ol' hubby (a surprisingly good Richard Gere) finds out. This is where the movie takes a rather ludicrous turn, but no matter which way the plot would have gone, Lane still would have delivered a quiet and amazing performance that lifted "Unfaithful" from schlock to grace, as it does finely in the final product.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not Just About Sex...
Review: There is a certain beauty contained within this film that makes it beyond a film about infidelity and its consequences. Diane Lane didn't get my attention until the recent "The Glass House." As a new fan, I had to see 'Unfaithful'...her performance is nothing short of remarkable.
The story revolves around a 'happily married', middle-aged couple living in the suburbs of NY with one small son. Their life is the picture of the 'American dream', until one day, Mrs. Sumner (Diane Lane) goes into the city on business and cosmically collides with the much younger Paul Martel (Martinez). When he invites her in to clean up her skinned knee a most deadly affair begins.
What makes this movie different from all the other films with themes such as betrayal, etc, is that we see the struggle and transformation Diane's character makes. Several times we see Diane reflect on her various 'visits' to Martinez and all at once her face displays pleasure, pain, and paranoia. She brings likability to a character we should hate. Richard Gere is one of my favorite actors and I deeply respect him for taking a 'backseat' role in this film. His character torments himself wondering why his wife would possibly want to cheat on him, as he thought he was providing a perfect life.
Added suspense and thrills come about when Gere starts to suspect and eventually finds out about the affair. We then see the direct effect affairs have on families. The murder mystery was thrown in more for entertainment value but the true artistic aspect remains in the adultress' mind.
We've seen affairs start from heartbreak, drunkeness, seduction...any reason other than this film's...boredom. From boredom and seduction we get obsession, we see Diane become addicted to her breakaway from daily life. For those of you who love Richard Gere as much as I do, you really have to bite your lip watching him getting cheated on! However, there is great remorse as Connie (Diane) really does love her husband, but someone dies before the affair is ended. This movie truly remains with its viewers. I recommend picking up the haunting tracks 'Moby - Rushing' and 'E.S. Posthumus - Nara' to reexperience the emotions captured through watching 'Unfathful.' This is a definete must see!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Beautifully, gloriously, painfully disturbing
Review: Diane Lane.

As a professional actor and closet playwright, I spent much of this movie humbled by what has to be, if not THE greatest, one of the greatest displays of emotional and spiritual/artistic courage ever to be put on screen. Diane Lane makes Anthony Hopkins' journey to find Hannibal Lecter within himself for THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS seem like a walk in the park.

There are five movies that come to mind when I think of the subject of infidelity. Before this, the other four were Bertolucci's BESEIGED with Thandie Newton, of course FATAL ATTRACTION, Spike Lee's message about race JUNGLE FEVER, and DAMAGE, with an incredible role by Jeremy Irons. BESEIGED is a European art film that seeminlgy tastefully ends where the difficult questions infidelity brings to mind begin. FATAL ATTRACTION seemed to be written by women who were too afraid of being in love with cheatin' heart men to make any art; under the surface it was almost too campy in its portrayal of the crazed lunatic woman as heart of moral parable--the price of Man's playin' out on Woman--to be taken seriously. JUNGLE FEVER, as much as I love Spike when he's at the top of his game, went soft on us by making the messenger (sexuality as the basis of American racism) more important than the message (the fragility of the marriage relationship and the human soul). And DAMAGE was like a more adult version of FATAL ATTRACTION, in that it seemed to be a study of an obsession that would have destroyed a marriage if lust never came to be what drove it, not lust, marriage or infidelity itself.

UNFAITHFUL is a movie that needs to be seen for a person to understand how it towers above and achieves everything that the four I just mentioned tried to do (or should have). The best double feature I could think of would be pairing this with AMERICAN BEAUTY; UNFAITHFUL could easily be seen as a sublime lesson in what the suburbs can do to the soul, and how it as such can be more dangerous to the soul than the ghetto's crime rate can be to the body and mind. *Boredom* seems to be the only motivating force leading to the eventual destruction of their entire lives in this movie--a woman's boredom. And yet what makes this film so powerful (other than, again, the triple-Oscar winning performance of Diane Lane) is the fact that it is so well written and masterfuly directed--not to mention achieves ensemble with its supporting cast of men and women--that a clear cut motivation really does not exist. Glen Close was just crazy; Michael Douglas was just selfish; Jeremy Irons was just strung up too tight and a profoundly manipulative woman snapped him; Wesley Snipes (according to Spike) just had to have some White-ness; Thandie Newton was heartbroken...everyone had a clear cut motivation for their actions (otherwise known as the megaphone for the director in question's ideas about life [or the marketplace]), except Diane Lane in UNFAITHFUL. And that is what will really disturb you to the point of needing to take a couple days out and digest the lesson on human nature you have been given by the time the credits role.

If you are a Richard Gere fan, you will be surprised over the fact that, as good an actor as he is and can be, he triumphs in this movie almost purely by staying out of Dianel Lane's artistic way! He deserves a *most generous supporting actor* Oscar. My girlfriend's life was changed by what she saw in this movie (it deeply frightened and overwhelmed her); and I think mine was too. If you are in love or married, see this movie at your own risk. But see it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Unfaithful
Review: is based on Claude Chabrol's **La Femme Infidele**(1969). I am not familiar with the original, but I understand that Chabrol was fond of Hitchcock and movies with murder and infidelity were a specialty of his, and the afore-mentioned picture was part of a trilogy of sorts dealing with infidelity ( including**Le Boucher**(1969) ),and all starring his then wife Stephanie Audran.
When I saw **Unfaitful** I found myself wondering where the story was going, with its study of a youngish middle aged wife(Diane Lane)having an affair with a younger man. Something was missing, until somewhat past the middle of the film, when what was a rather understated character study of a woman having an affair that she was probably going to break off anyway became complicated by the husband(Richard Gere) finding out. Then, well past the half-way point of the film, the story shifted gears and became the melodrama that you somehow sensed director Adrian Lyne wanted to be making all along. The effect is a little jarring, as if two stories, temperamentally very different stories, had been sewn together, the woman's story, then the man's.
Gere's husband's obsessiveness is frankly less interesting than Lane's affair, especially when we contrast Diane Lane's very rich and interesting performance with Gere's more routine one. I found myself wishing that the story was all told from the wife's point of view, especially since this would have created a sense of suspense, the wife wondering, "what happened to the exotic French boyfriend, and why is my husband acting so funny?"

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: diane lane
Review: i thought it was pretty good .especially diane lane .she made this movie interesting .didnt think i was going to like it at first but it turned out to be well worth watching .
the plot of of the really got me into it . couldnt keep my eyes off the screen especially with diane on it.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: UNFAITHFUL should have stayed faithful to subtlety.
Review: We know that infidelity does not pay from Fatal Attraction years ago and now the cautionary tale gets renewed through a gender reversal - with the wife as the unfaithful party from the same director Adrian Lyne.

Connie Summers (Diane Lane) fatefully chance upon a gorgeous French bookseller Paul Martel (Oliver Martinez) and is captivated by his charms and flagrant sex appeal. She treads a tightrope between temptation and staying loyal to her husband Edward (Richard Gere). She is powerless to the attraction and her sensual awakening - and thus the illicit affair continues - with devastating results to her marriage and family...

The first half of the movie is elegantly controlled with beautiful direction from Lyne. His metaphorism through the gale to signal a whirlwind affair and constant shots of Connie's marriage ring to hint of her moral dilemma is sublime. His sensual erotic style titillates through intimate camera angles yet is aptly restraint without frontal nudity. Yet the more surprising revelation is Diane Lane who tunes her performance as the adulteress to a virtuoso mode. She is what that clinches the movie - through her emotional turmoil and guilt with her ecstasy to unravel the moral quandry. Richard Gere plays the anguished husband with straight bitterness; Martinez oozes charm in the role of a seducer.

The movie unfortunately cannot handle the complications seriously which is blown to mythic proportions by a murder subplot that crumbles the emotional intensity. It rapidly spins to a predictible mode where it becomes overly dramatic and ridiculous, leaving the ending to the interpretation of the audience. UNFAITHFUL should have stayed faithful to its subtle course to paint a devastating portrait of the consequences of infidelity but it just strayed off to fulfil the thriller part. We should be thankful though, it doesn't preach.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Direction + Diane Lane = Unfaithful
Review: This is a nice movie.

The acting is decent (Richard Gere is his usual self, either you like him or not, and Olivier Martinez seems to be a perfect fit for the role -just ask your female friends!)

The screenplay is decent (ok, the story starts rather unremarkably but it gets better as time passes, and one might say that the ending comes as a surprise).

What I liked even more, was the direction of this movie. Adrian Lyne knows the job well. Unfaithful follows the same pattern like some of his past movies, such as 9 1/2 weeks and Fatal Attraction: sex, obsession, (in)fidelity... all play major roles. I especially enjoy his close-up scenes. One such example is the seduction scene, where Olivier Martinez touches Diane Lane's shoulder to take her coat off, and the camera focuses on his hand. This simple touch, as it is shown, reveals the heat of the moment in the best possible way.

But this is truly Diane Lane's movie. She breathes in life to Unfaithful. It could be a good piece of cinema even without her, but her presence makes it even better.

In any case, Unfaithful is a movie that you will surely enjoy.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Good Story, Good Acting
Review: If you've seen the previews, you know the movie's setup: a seemingly happily married woman (Diane Lane) cheats on her husband (Richard Gere) with a suave, mysterious stranger. There is no apparent reason for her to do so other than pure pleasure and her lover's character is deliberately kept as a stranger to the audience. The writers did a good job of not turning the film into another "Fatal Attraction" where there's a lot of over the top drama, insanity, and stalkers. It is realistic in terms of the manner in which the characters deal with the plot's developments and the actors effortlessly carried them out. Grown-ups will enjoy but this film may have you thinking twice about your spouse's whereabouts -- just kidding. Hey, maybe...


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