Rating: 
Summary: "A Beautiful Mind"
Review: "A Beautiful Mind" is one of the few films to look at mental illness in a real and positive way. It is also an amazing motion picture. Concerning the story of brilliant mathematician John Nash, played by the brilliant Russel Crowe, and his wife Alicia, played by the luminous Jennifer Connelly, "A Beautiful Mind" succeeds in taking the audience on an often intense and emotional journey where you care deeply for the characters.The film follow Nash from his college days at Princeton University where he makes a groundbreaking discovery, to his winning the Nobel Prize in 1994. John Nash courts Alicia, a beautiful young woman who is his equal intellectually and emotionally. They eventually marry and have a son, and then John is diagnosed with schizophrenia. I won't disclose the film's jaw-dropping twist, as some reviewers have. Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman have come under fire for "cheating" the audience, but this method was used to make the viewer aware of how schizophrenia works, and the huge effect that it has on people's lives. "A Beautiful Mind" would not work without the central performances of Russel Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. Crowe makes Nash such a rich and absorbing personality that you cannot help but be riveted to him. He works with subtle gestures and eye movements to personify John Nash, changing his entire body to be that of the character. That is real acting folks. This film is one of the chief reasons why Russel Crowe is one of the best actors working now. He makes us sympathize and love Nash, but never pitying him. Jennifer Connelly follows her amazing performance in "Requiem for a Dream" with this role. As the wife of the mentally tormented Nash, Connelly creates a woman of enormous strength and loyalty. She is every bit Crowe's and Nash's equal, and deservedly won an Oscar for her subtle and emotional work here. Together these two actors create two noble and real characters. Ron Howard also is excellent his his direction of the film, never letting the events become sensationalized or melodramatic. It is always real and heartbreaking. Above all, "A Beautiful Mind" is the uplifting story of a man who was able to conquer the demons within himself. As the elderly Nash says to Alicia in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "You are the reason I am here. You are all my reasons." It is a triumph of a beautiful mind, a beautiful man, and a triumph of unconditional devotion and love.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't waste your time or $
Review: I absolutely, 150% HATED this movie!... After getting so many great reviews and winning 4 Oscars, I was excited to see this movie. What a disappointment it turned out to be! The acting wasn't terrible on the actors and actresses part, but the whole plot was horrific! I can't believe this movie got such great reviews! ... It's such a shame such an amazing and inspiring story was put to pieces.
Rating:
Summary: "Terrified...Mortified...Petrified...Stupefied...By You."
Review: A Beautiful Mind finally gives us a reason for Ron Howard to stay in the game. Some of his earlier work (Backdraft, Apollo 13, Ransom) I absolutely thought was trash. I dont mean to be so hipocritcal, but its just my opinion. But then came "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and now "A Beautiful Mind". To say the least this film deserved the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture. It definitely deserved the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Jennifer Connelly, who did a tremendous job. But as fate would have it, it lost Best Actor. Which Im not really throwing everything down on Denzel Washington, because he did turn in a quite great performance, but if you see both you will see why Russell Crowe should have won it hands down. This true story is about a brilliant Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe) who after several years without treatment finds out he has schizophrenia. Along with the help of his beautiful wife (Jennifer Connelly) John tries to beat the schizophrenia with willpower. Which like he says "its just a problem without a answer. That all. I solve problems, remember?" If you havent seen this work of art yet, you should do so. Its filled with brilliant performances and yet a great DVD to put in the collection.
Rating: 
Summary: Good movie. Not best movie.
Review: This movie reminded me of When a Man Loves a Woman, in which alcoholism never looked prettier (Meg Ryan, Andy Garcia and several perfect children, all shot in beautiful muted earth tones). I wish directors shooting for Oscar "triumph-of-the-human-spirit" consideration would stick to topics other than mental illnesses and addictions, because then they inevitably have to compromise the integrity right out of the project. (My Left Foot was one of the few to get it absolutely right, although that character's limitation was physical.) I don't care what the facts about Nash are or how skewed the film gets them. It's not a documentary. We go through this almost every year with one film or another. It's a tired argument. The movie has to work on its own dramatic merits. Does this one? Yeah, sure. It held and moved me. However, I keep seeing "Best picture of last year" and "Oscar got it right" in these Amazon reviews. Since it's all opinion anyway, let me opine that Mulholland Falls was the best picture last year, and if it wasn't, then it must have been either Moulin Rouge or Memento. I've never directed a movie or written one, either, and I couldn't begin to have known what to do with those three at the storyboarding stage. But A Beautiful Mind is just a degree or two above commercial TV's Disease of the Week Theater, and even I could have come up with something possibly resembling this movie. The one single outstanding thing about A Beautiful Mind, as has also been mentioned, is what Oscar got wrong -- Russell Crowe gave an astonishing performance. When will the Academy reward merit and not likeability? Denzel Washington in Training Day was excellent. But Crowe was better. Unfortunately, Crowe threatened someone in Australia and the Academy decided he didn't deserve two awards in a row. Well, tough. The public can see through that sort of politics. Crowe won, no matter who holds the statue.
Rating:
Summary: This is great!
Review: This movie is the best I've ever seen. Russell Crowe did the most amazing job playing John Nash, I believe he should have gotten an Academy Award for his performance. This movie makes you feel one way in the beginning and then throws you for a complete loop mid-way through it. After I watched it I just had to talk to somebody about it, you will have to because it effects you so much. I don't think this is a movie for really young viewers because they wouldn't understand a lot of what is going on. After I watched the movie I knew that was going to win Best Picture, how could it not? Russell Crowe should have gotten an Academy Award for his breathtaking performance, (Plus he looked really good in this movie for all the ladies out there) Everytime I see a movie Russell's in I leave the movie feeling totally in awe of this man's incredible acting ability. Unfortunetly some people think he's a jerk and a Hollywood playboy, but who cares? THE MAN CAN ACT!!!!! Jennifer Connelly did a wonderful job as well and she totally deserved all the hype she got for her performance. And whoever didn't like this movie, they obviously didn't see the same movie I did.
Rating:
Summary: Paradise Lost and Regained: a story of redemption and hope
Review: In his younger days John Nash struggled to define himself from others through his mathematical brilliance. He did so often at the expense of the human relationships that grounded him to this world. As he himself has later stated, madness can be viewed as a type of conformity. John Nash's fear of conformity -- of being ordinary -- perhaps fueled the onset of schizophrenia that jeopardized his career, his relationships, and everything he held dear. I read "A Beautiful Mind" long before the book became a movie. While the film skews some of the facts surrounding Nash's illness, Akiva Goldman's brilliant screenplay does so only in attempt to help the moviegoer visualize the nature of one man's delusions -- his internal demons. Purists who would deny the filmmaker a certain license with facts would have to settle for a book which was in many ways, unfilmable. Thank you, Ron Howard, for taking what was (for me) the most compelling biography of the last decade and bringing it to film. Your movie never shies from the failings of its subject, nor does it allow Nash's shortcomings to obscure his intellectual and human promise. We live in a world in which we are taught to distrust what is good in others. In which a single human flaw in our public figures is somehow allowed to negate the weight of their achievements. (Their failures keep them "like us," and we don't like what we have become.) This movie is not afraid to offer us a flawed hero. The film reaches for a level of pathos and empathy for Nash that surpasses even that achieved by the book and which left me in tears. Not an easy task. This is a story about the ascendance of genius, its descent into madness, and the redeeming quality of love. It is not a perfect movie. There are moments of awkwardness early in the film as it struggles to communicate the nature of Nash's genius. That's okay. Most of these scenes are well handled and some are quite amusing. Genius is not an easy thing to illustrate without leaving most of us in the dust. There are many movies I rent once and move on to the next. Others I watch over and over through the years, always finding something new or at least a reminder of something I should not forget. This one's a keeper.
Rating:
Summary: Say What?
Review: How can I describe this picture? It would be like watching a Schwarzenneger movie with Arnold hanging off a building, shooting bad guys with machine guns, next thing you know he's being committed, with his wife mopping his forehead saying earnestly, "Honey, you need HELP!" And then you realize the guy was not hanging off of buildings, not shooting bad guys with a machine gun, he was just as nutty as hell. Then the guy recovers, but you don't. You don't recover the cash they took off you when you rented the movie, and you don't recover the self-respect you once had. No. You just emerge from the theater slightly old, slightly shaken with the vague memory of being rolled.
To put it mathematically, let T represent the time spent watching the movie. Let W represent time wasted. T = W.
Rating:
Summary: Overrated Pap?
Review: I think so! A Beautiful Mind is "Movie Of The Week" material that at times seems to parody mental illness. It misses it's mark from start to finish. Russell Crowe's job wasn't Oscar worthy in my opinion. And this is quite possibly one of Ed Harris' worst on screen performances. He's such a great actor. How did he get talked into this role? Since I wasted my $...at the theater, I don't intend on wasting double that to own this disappointment. A big blemish on Ron Howard's otherwise notable directing career. Use the $$ for a pizza and a movie rental from your local video store.
Rating:
Summary: A great movie, but I didn't like it....
Review: This is probably going to be the strangest write up I've done. I wasn't sure what to rate the movie because I didn't care for it. While I can acknowledge the talent of the director and the actors involved (all of which deserved the awards they have recieved for this film) that doesn't make it something I would ever want to watch again and I was never once moved emotionally by this film the way I was Titanic or Forrest Gump. I still must give A Beautiful Mind high marks for being an original movie, with excellent acting and directing, but at the same time I wonder why the movie was made. The script content is average at best, focusing on a portion of John Nash's life and his single contribution to Science and Economics. Nash is an awkward person, often rude and unfriendly (I could never connect with his character), though the film his condition never changes, he just learns how to deal with it. The film fails to go into any great detail about what makes John Nash's publication signifigant enough to recieve a Nobel prize. I'm really left not knowing much of anything about Nash's contribution at the end, and that's a shame.
Rating:
Summary: This is truly a great movie
Review: This DVD is loaded with Special Features that make it worth the [price]. There are a ton of deleted scenes with or without director comments. The Movie itself is excellent; it made me wish so much that he actually wasn't crazy when his wife was walking to the shed. I've never actually gotten into a movie so much that I wanted something to happen like it was real life. Buy this DVD you won't be disappointed!
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