Rating: Summary: Best & Most Heartbreaking Film of All Movies I've Ever Seen Review: This is the greatest film I've ever seen. No one I know (of the dozens I've urged to see it) has ever disliked it, and it has become for others, their favorite movie too. It is really a story of all people: in their struggles on earth, their increasingly less purposeful attempts to survive, their deaths, the things they love, their religious faith transcending their deaths. It is also the story of the varied reactions of people toward one such person, a wounded, dying I.R.A. gunman on the run on the streets of Belfast or Londonderry in the late 1940s. The cinematography, the breadth of social classes (and ages) shown, the symbols, the suspense, the tenderness and callousness, are fascinating. The religious insights of the gunman, and of the grandmother of the girl who has a crush on him (and goes out into the Irish alleys to search for him) and of the police chief searching for him, are extraordinarily deep for a movie that is also edge-of-seat suspense. I've read that this is James Mason's favorite among the movies he did. The director Carol Reed's better known movie, "The Third Man" with Orson Welles, was not quite as broad or as deep as this. I note that every single person reviewing this movie has given it the highest rating this system allows; (how many other movies are AVERAGING 5 stars?) I would submit that it is the greatest movie ever made.
Rating: Summary: A truely superb film Review: This movie was so ahead of its time. It is bleak, honest, wonderfully acted, intelligently written, exquisitly photographed, and all an around great motion picture. It's perfect.
Rating: Summary: Great Movie: Limited DVD Review: Well I am not going to delve into facts expressed more eloquently by all those that preceeded me. Suffice to say that the movie is fantastic, so much so that 25 years since I last saw it i had to hunt it down on DVD. It is the DVD itself that was a bit surprising, it starts right into the movie and the menu button will give you a list of chapter/scenes that you can jump to, in a rather primative format. That's why my review rates this as a 3 star product but in reality the movie itself is a nona-fide 5 star+ winner. Just would have liked to see more. I don't know if movies of that era showed closing credits because a lot from Britain had them at the start. Having said that the dvd ends with the words "the end". So once again great movie, would have liked to have seen a bit more effort on the dvd, star bios, trailers, awards etc Dean
Rating: Summary: Great Movie: Limited DVD Review: Well I am not going to delve into facts expressed more eloquently by all those that preceeded me. Suffice to say that the movie is fantastic, so much so that 25 years since I last saw it i had to hunt it down on DVD. It is the DVD itself that was a bit surprising, it starts right into the movie and the menu button will give you a list of chapter/scenes that you can jump to, in a rather primative format. That's why my review rates this as a 3 star product but in reality the movie itself is a nona-fide 5 star+ winner. Just would have liked to see more. I don't know if movies of that era showed closing credits because a lot from Britain had them at the start. Having said that the dvd ends with the words "the end". So once again great movie, would have liked to have seen a bit more effort on the dvd, star bios, trailers, awards etc Dean
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