Rating: 
Summary: Good multifaceted story with terrific cast...
Review: Dalglish (Wes Bentley) arrives to Kingdome Come in the High Sierra's in order to survey the direction of the railroad he is bringing to the area. At the party in which Dalglish is traveling there are two women, the mother Elena Burn (Nastassja Kinski) and her daughter Hope (Sarah Polley). The two women bring something old with them that only the mayor of Kingdome Come, Daniel Dillon (Peter Mullan), is aware of as it awakens his memories of his arrival to Kingdome Come. He arrived many years earlier with his wife and infant child, whom he traded for the claim of the goldmine in Kingdome Come. The Claim is a well directed story as it is multifaceted and is supported by a dazzling cast that performs brilliantly. In the end, the Claim will offer an impressive cinematic experience that has something for everyone.
Rating: 
Summary: You'll sleep soundly. Don't forget the blanket.
Review: Good heavens, is this film boring. Long, meandering, poorly edited, well-shot, and generally well-acted (with the exception of Milla Jovovich...this film is at least noteworthy for highlighting her lack of charisma and acting talent in a stunningly effective manner). This film, a "mood piece"? Perhaps, if that translates in English to "we forgot to include an actual story/film somewhere in all of this footage we spent our energies on". An overrated snoozefest.
Rating: 
Summary: Beyond Depressing
Review: Hide the razor blades and lay in a big supply of Prozac before attempting to watch this long, dull and dismal western. Normally I like deep and psychologically challenging films, but this one just tries too hard to peg the "film-snob meter". I never really found myself caring for any of the characters. Sarah Polley's character is annoyingly undeveloped, coming off as innocent and naive in the first half of the film and then suddenly out of the blue (boom!) she is an aspiring actress and is singing in a bar?!? Wes Bentley looks exactly like he is - a young actor in a fake beard trying to play someone older and more mature. And Winterbottom's direction is intensely bland, looking like he must have attended the Clint Eastwood school of uninspired filmmaking. No wonder this film sank out of sight after its release.
Rating:
Summary: Black and white in colour...
Review: I can see why this particular film (and many of the director's other works) had such a hard time finding an audience when first released in 2000, what with the endlessly roaming camera and those flashbacks that seem to come out of nowhere, but for me personally, the problems have less to do with Winterbottom's aesthetic choices as a filmmaker and more to do with audiences pre-conceived opinions about the film due to poor promotion and marketing. In my opinion, the film was woefully misrepresented by the people at Fox Pathè (the distributors) and even by the producers themselves, who seemed to announce The Claim as something of a traditional western along the lines of Unforgiven, or even as a precursor to the glossy, chocolate-box picture, Cold Mountain (a film greatly inferior to this). Both of these examples are, however, worlds away from the style and atmosphere of The Claim, with Winterbottom and his screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce here providing an almost biblical downward spiral for their central characters that is as far removed from Hollywood as you can possibly get.
As you can probably deduce from the title of this review, The Claim is a bleak film, dealing with characters pushed to the edge and pent up with all manner of secret shame, guilt and fury. The story takes it's inspiration from Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, but it is in no way a straight interpretation, but more of a re-investigation and analysis into the central predicament. The story therefore becomes a simple morality tale, though made all the more austere through the director's unwillingness to complicate the proceedings with bouts of melodrama or sentimentality. However, Winterbottom's films are merely simplistic on a superficial level. Like his cinematic countryman Mike Leigh, he creates work from a rough sketch that is elaborated on by his actors as the whole process goes along. Thus, in a way, the act of making a film is a lot like the building of the railroad here, and the stark changes that fall into place within the mood of the dwellers of the town Kingdom Come are therefore representative of the always-shifting viewpoints & overlapping narrative timelines that emerge as the picture unfolds.
The railroad that is so central to the proceedings here has a number of meanings subtextually linked to its involvement in the plot. It is a representation of an uncertain future... about change, progress, the complete antithesis of everything that the character of Dillon represents. It is also the device that brings the pivotal outsiders into town, Dalglish, the charismatic railroad surveyor replete with a posse of men, the dying immigrant Elena, stricken with T.B. and finally, and most importantly, the aptly-named Hope, Elena's daughter here in town to search out her long-lost father. Added to this troika of outsiders, we also have the headstrong and exotic Lucile, Dillon's mistress and owner of the local knocking shop where Dalglish's wayward men spend most of their spare time. Here, the remarkable thing is how Boyce manages to bring the characters together, establishing relationships slowly, like an extended chamber piece. As the story progresses, the emphasis on Lucile, Elena and Dalglish become less apparent, as they begin to merge into the not-too-distant background as Dillon and Hope take precedence over the narrative at hand.
Despite the numerous allusions & (might I say, unfavourable) comparisons to Altman's anti-western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Winterbottom's directorial style is more indebted to European filmmakers, like Bergman, Kieslowski and Herzog... as he composes his images in a pallet of stark monochrome, with black-clad figures frost-bitten by snow juxtaposing with the void-like whiteness of the locale, whilst using the editing to break or undermine the rhythm (unlike other films of this genre, that are all about 'establishing' rhythm). The Altman references are merely superficial ciphers, with the exterior of snowbound locations, crumbling whorehouses and ever-winding railroads giving way to a depiction of obsession and redemption that has more in common with a film like Fitzcaralldo. It is the character of Dillon who really carries the film, as the director singles him out as a lost soul, whilst the town he once loved becomes a metaphor for his prevailing greed and anguish, to go alongside that other interpretation of the town as a whorehouse (with Lucile it's newly appointed mayor/madam), allowing Winterbottom to draw parallels with a film like Quarelle or Lola by Fassbinder or the latter's inspiration, The Blue Angel.
That final scene offers us a haunting evocation of pride in the face of defeat, and has the ability to work its way into your subconscious via Winterbottom's use of almost universal iconography. A searing depiction of one man's personal redemption played out against the largest scale, with the key elements of power, betrayal, identity, ambition and loss being worked into every subtle nuance of the script to from a rich tapestry of inter-linked vignettes that come together to create a sort-of Greek-tragedy amidst the decline of the 'wild west'. As Michael Nyman's evocative, bombastic Morricone-inspired score begins to intensify, the images of Dillon, eyes devoid of expression as he marches through the town slowly crumbling all around him, plays off an early scene in which a horse caught in a munitions explosion gallops off into the hill, engulfed by flames.
Rating:
Summary: Would have worked better as a stage play
Review: I just felt bored. I was looking for a promising story about the american gold rush - and so I got to this film. I really love movies and I must say that watching this movie just was a waste of time. Nothing really works. The story could have been of some interest. But neither the director nor the really poor cast could transform the drama into the necessary dimension. There is not one character you care about. Well, there is a lot of just white landscape. You can do not much with that setting concerning outdoor shots. But if the camerawork would have been a bit more inventing, the whole thing could have been more interesting. I don't think that static shots have to underline stagnation in the character development. It might be that the movie works better in a theater, but for home entertainment on DVD it offers nothing of inerest. The sound design works well, but that's it.
Rating: 
Summary: a pleasant surprise
Review: I just stumbled across this movie on cable and was pleasantly surprised. It does owe it's look to the classic "McCabe and Mrs. Miller", but I find no fault with that. A naturalistic movie with a gritty tone, a measured pace and a matter of factness about it. I loved the look at this high Sierra frontier town and it's denizens. Movie viewers weened on a steady diet of pyrotechnics and CGI might want to skip this one and revel in the MTV masturbations of something like "3000 Miles to Graceland" They won't enjoy this as evidenced by other reviewers considering this a bore. If you don't mind an atmospheric movie and don't need Al Pacino chewing the wallpaper to think that acting is going on, then you might just enjoy this melancholy western epic.
Rating:
Summary: Epic (n): 2+ hr. movie with no attention to characterization
Review: I really tried to enjoy this film, but what a bore! Ebert & Roeper must have been held at gunpoint to rate this as "Two Thumbs Up." Not even Milla and Nastassja could save this movie. Don't even waste your time watching this flick and awaiting the "shocking connection to Dillon . . . one that could devastate his town, his life and his empire." Anyone could see it coming a mile away, and even so, who cares? Certainly not the townspeople. Not for a moment did this script or the characters hold my interest. Everyone was underdeveloped. Milla looked tired and sweaty, and she annoyed the heck out of me with her awful singing. Nastassja was on her death bed throughout the movie, and so I couldn't even appreciate her beauty and talent, and her daughter, Sarah Polley, couldn't stop saying "thank you." Though the film had beautiful photography I couldn't help but wonder, what was the purpose of some shots being out of focus? It was a distraction more than anything else, because it most certainly did not lend to the mood. I'm keeping this only because of Natassja, and even so, I won't be viewing this again for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: The Claim is quite lame
Review: I really tried to enjoy this film, but what a bore! Ebert & Roeper must have been held at gunpoint to rate this as "Two Thumbs Up." Not even Milla and Nastassja could save this movie. Don't even waste your time watching this flick and awaiting the "shocking connection to Dillon . . . one that could devastate his town, his life and his empire." Anyone could see it coming a mile away, and even so, who cares? Certainly not the townspeople. Not for a moment did this script or the characters hold my interest. Everyone was underdeveloped. Milla looked tired and sweaty, and she annoyed the heck out of me with her awful singing. Nastassja was on her death bed throughout the movie, and so I couldn't even appreciate her beauty and talent, and her daughter, Sarah Polley, couldn't stop saying "thank you." Though the film had beautiful photography I couldn't help but wonder, what was the purpose of some shots being out of focus? It was a distraction more than anything else, because it most certainly did not lend to the mood. I'm keeping this only because of Natassja, and even so, I won't be viewing this again for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: The Claim is quite lame
Review: I really tried to enjoy this film, but what a bore! Ebert & Roeper must have been held at gunpoint to rate this as "Two Thumbs Up." Not even Milla and Nastassja could save this movie. Don't even waste your time watching this flick and awaiting the "shocking connection to Dillon . . . one that could devastate his town, his life and his empire." Anyone could see it coming a mile away, and even so, who cares? Certainly not the townspeople. Not for a moment did this script or the characters hold my interest. Everyone was underdeveloped. Milla looked tired and sweaty, and she annoyed the heck out of me with her awful singing. Nastassja was on her death bed throughout the movie, and so I couldn't even appreciate her beauty and talent, and her daughter, Sarah Polley, couldn't stop saying "thank you." Though the film had beautiful photography I couldn't help but wonder, what was the purpose of some shots being out of focus? It was a distraction more than anything else, because it most certainly did not lend to the mood. I'm keeping this only because of Natassja, and even so, I won't be viewing this again for a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: Visually stunning but ultimately unrewarding
Review: I really wanted to like this film, but it just doesn't come together. The acting and photography are wonderful but the directing is inadequate. It wasn't the film's length which bothered me, but rather the inability of the director to get the film's engine running. Michael Winterbottom is not a good storyteller and he seems more concerned with visuals than with character development. I was hoping for a film in the vein the Robert Altman's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller", but The Claim doesn't rise to that level. Yes, there is a sadness about the character's fate at the end of the film, but we really should be feeling something more than simple sadness. Set in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during the California gold rush, the picture "feels" right. The town looks cold and muddy and the actors really reflect the harsh environment of the old west. You come away feeling that this is the way it must have been. The "look" of the film is its greatest achievement and the reason for 3 stars.
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