Rating: 
Summary: Very good, Sir.
Review: Oooooh! I love this movie. A friend of mine didn't like it and said bad things about it, so I put off watching it and wasn't expecting much. But he never pays attention when he watches movies, he's always off thinking of something else, and this movie really needs your full and undivided attention. It's very complicated, very quiet in some ways. There are some perfect moments; where all the gentry are listening to the gentleman play the piano in the glittering room, and all the servants are very carefully and quitely listening from the stairs and behind doorways; you can feel the stillness in the house. It is a murder mystery, in it's way. And a sort of love story, and a story about class structure in England and the way life used to be. I'm very glad I have it.
Rating: 
Summary: Gosford Park
Review: Excise the murder mystery and there's a really great story here about how people treat one another, regardless of class or station. There's also a nice contrast between British reserve and American directness. Yet, Hollywood needed a hook, and that's where the classic "well-dressed dinner guests gathered around a body, wondering who could have done it" device comes in. To Altman's credit, he wisely spends as little time as possible on the actual murder and gives the inspectors who show up hardly any screen time. Good thing, since the real treat here comes in keeping track of all the uniformly wonderful performances, bedroom shenanigans, betrayals, alliances and nasty infighting. As a class warfare piece, it pales next to Renoir's classic Rules of the Game. But Gosford Park manages to make its points without overstating them, and while a tad overlong, it holds together nicely at the end.
Rating: 
Summary: Boy! Was I looking forward to this movie, but...
Review: what a major disappointment. Not very hard to figure out 'who done it'. What's harder is figuring out why they spent ALL this time on it. Great cast. Fair acting (actually no acting ability was really necessary as there was no depth to any character, let alone the whole plot). Patiently waited for things to develop...and waited...and waited &, yet again, waited. Finally about 2/3s of the way through a murder took place. Wasted a lot of precious time hoping for better. Want a tip? Don't waste YOUR time.
Rating:
Summary: Think "Clue" only better
Review: This is a thoroughly enjoyable English who-done-it. A lot like "Clue", but different enough to warrant watching this movie too. The setting and costumes were great! Very authentic. And to watch the relationship between the servants and the "masters" was just fascinating. Amazing that the English once actually lived like that - side by side with people that they basically ignored day in and day out, but people who saw and knew everything about the household and the people in it. The acting was superbly done. I love Ryan Phillippe. The dialog was very well written. However, because of the English accents and possibly some poor sound editing, the dialog was very hard to hear in places. The lines went by quickly and sometimes very softly. This was my one complaint about this movie. You not only missed some of the dialog, it made the intricacies of the plot very hard to follow. And it is a shame with such wonderful dialog that you have to watch the movie at least twice to catch all the lines and to fully understand all the motivations behind the plot. But besides this one complaint, I thought it was a really well done movie. Very enjoyable. Very entertaining
Rating: 
Summary: BAH TWADDLE PIP
Review: Fans of Bertie Wooster may be interested in this as it is very interesting to see just how big an industry an English country estate really was. But as a film it lacks the wit of PG Woodhouse. John Cleese was good but not enough to make this a good movie. I am sorry but I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I just do not like Robert Altman's work. In future I shall avoid anything he has directed.
Why are a wise man and a wise guy opposites?
Rating:
Summary: Astonishing
Review: One of the great films of all time. Watch it over and over until you are enlightened(might take 724 viewings). Only Topsy Turvy and The Last September are in this class. Altman went from "Nashville" in 1975 for Heaven's sake, to this masterpiece. It seems all things are possible indeed.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT!
Review: This movies is a very good movie, dispite all those bad reviews. A very good and funny mystery movie.
Rating:
Summary: Bloody boring, if you ask me
Review: I'm sorry to have seen so much good talent wasted on such a boring movie. I love Maggie Smith and Helen Mirren and wasn't disappointed in their performance - Maggie in particular is masterful, but the story is littered with boring, confusing, and tedious conversations, never seeming to build up to anything. I was determined to stick it out to the end just in case there should be an interesting development in the "mystery" - but no such luck. Don't waste your time and money on this one!
Rating:
Summary: all dressed up but nowhere to go
Review: Altman made a huge mistake with this film: if you're going to shoot a talking heads picture--and GP is nothing but scene after scene of actors sitting and talking--you'd better have a plot that goes somewhere. But Altman doesn't have a story or really anything to say in Gosford Park. After the five-minute grace period he gets from showing off the estate and trotting out the army of acting talent he's assembled, it's all over--Gosford Park goes nowhere. GP is dull, dull, dull, because there's nothing to watch--nothing's really at stake as the camera moves slowly from room to room, spying on the cast members hitting and missing with their improvs, all of them bravely fumbling around for a point to the whole exercise. Mike Figgis' Time Code had the same problem as GP--great cast, no story, hit-or-miss improv in search of a point--but at least that film was pitched as an experiment in cinematography from the get go, making it interesting to watch at least on that level. Sadly, you're out of luck on every level with GP. Not even the upstairs/downstairs observations save Altman here--they've been done better before, in, well, Upstairs Downstairs. ...
Rating:
Summary: True Stories goes upmarket
Review: To really understand the film "Gosford Park" you need to know that in the 1970s the scriptwriter, actor Julian Fellows, was augmenting his salary as a thespian by trotting out romance novels under the pseudonym "Rebecca Greville". And that, for all the hype and Oscars, is what "Gosford Park" really is - a tarted up, upper crust romance novel, with all the attendent shortcomings of that genre. The cast list is absolutely "top drawer", and they do the best they can with what is ultimately a totally meaningless vacuous script. (I was going to say "plot", but in the final analysis the script is neither substantial enough nor coherent enough to warrant such a description). The film basically concerns a group of society twits who come together for a weekend house party in the 1930s, and the staff who wait upon them. During the weekend someone gets killed, the police arrive, the murder is solved, and the guests go home. Roll credits. Do we learn anything of any consequence about any of the characters? Far from it. In fact the characters are uniformly two dimensional, including such tired old stereotypes as the buxom but stupid housemaid who offers her sexual services to any male member of the houseparty who cares to take advantage of them; and a detective so affably bumbling that he'd have a hard time finding his way INTO a brown paper bag, let alone out again. If there'd been any genuine humour in it, this could at least have been labelled as a "comedy of manners". Unfortunately it is as boring as the house guests, and as transparent as the so-called murder mystery. Bottom line: a totally fatuous waste of time and money for cast, crew and audience alike.
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