To me, this movie is perfection.

Sorry, this movie sucks

Pretty Good

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

'Absence of Malice', Directed by the late/great Sydney Pollack, is well-acted, but flawed. The performances are in complete command, but the writing material as well as the pacing, play a spoilsport. 'Absence of Malice' Synopsis: When a prosecutor leaks a false story that a liquor warehouse owner is involved in the murder of an union head, the man's life begins to unravel.'Absence of Malice' suffers from slow-pacing & an erratic Screenplay. The first-hour, especially, disappoints because of the two above mentioned problems. The second-hour starts with force & maintains a certain mood, although the culmination is strictly okay. Kurt Luedtke's Screenplay is alright. How one wishes if the first-hour had a stronger punch! Pollack's Direction, like always, is competent, but the Writing Material doesn't do justice to his work. Cinematography is rich, while the Editing needed some serious persuasion.Performance-Wise: The late/great Paul Newman & Sally Field are the life of 'Absence of Malice'. Newman is masterful in his part, while Field delivers a knock-out performance. Also superb is Melinda Dillon, who enacts a challenging role, with brilliance. On the whole, Watch 'Absence of Malice' for some fine acting.

This is a great theatrical interpretation of a classic media ethics issue for a reporter and her newspaper. The hard-hitting reporter, Megan Carter (played by Sally Field), finds a great story with many juicy facts. Wanting to get the story first, Carter, does what she must to get it. She ends up reading planted files, getting involved with the subject of her story, and ruining many relationships and lives. It is not until everything has turned upside down before she realizes that she was only a pawn that helped no one and ruined literally everything for everyone, including herself. Despite her obnoxious demeanor as a relentless reporter, the other characters, like Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman), care for her. Blinded by her motive for the story, she fails to see her life, relationships, and integrity have all taken a backseat. Carter doesn't receive the wake-up call of what she has done until everything unfolds and she realizes she was only a pawn in the greater scheme of things. She learned the "truth" she reported was never accurate in the first place. Carter felt justified as a reporter to write her story and in turn she failed to see her own lack of character and integrity in how she acquired the facts, the evidence was dirty. Even though she may not have been malicious, she was absence malice along with other virtues that makes a real reporter great. In the end, Carter acknowledged that her job as a reporter is important, she just didn't do it well and did it terribly. Absence of Malice is a great portrayal of the challenges a reporter must face and that a reporter's job is bigger than simply reporting the facts. The issues and the lines get blurry but it is up to the reporter to make the decision on how to handle it. Although protected by the law, the law couldn't tell her what was right, what was wrong, or what the consequences would be. Generally an editor is a helpful guide. But in Carter's case, her editor was just as interested in the story as she was and fueled her drive. Ultimately Carter, had to pay the price to play the game. And she paid big time as did every character involved with her. This is not a movie with the ultimate happy ending. It did not leave me feeling good about what happened in the end, but rather left me feeling like I personally endured a "hard-lesson learned."

A reversal of "All The President's Men", Sydney Pollack's "Absence of Malice" sees an overzealous prosecutor leaking information to a young reporter (Sally Field). The leak involves Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman), a liquor wholesaler whose father had a criminal past and mob affiliations. When Field publishes her story, which implicates Gallagher in the murder of a unionist, Gallagher challenges her. He believes he was unfairly slandered.Unlike "All the President's Man", which saw valiant media-men carving through lies and half truths to get at facts (thereby rightfully exposing and incriminating), "Absence of Malice" thus does the opposite. Here, journalists and prosecutors trade in lies, half-truths and skirt around laws. Meanwhile, the film's victims are innocent businessmen who are wrongly accused of bullying unions. The film's title refers to a by-law which essentially allows journalists to "do wrong" if they can sufficiently prove that they harboured no ill intentions.Like most of Pollack's films, "Malice" is overlong, simply shot and drags.7/10 – Worth one viewing.

It's not a bad movie, not insulting to the intelligence or pandering to the glands, and it deals with matters of some ethical importance, but, man, it's murky stuff.Sally Field, cute and pixyish as ever, is a newspaper reporter in Miami. She's not particularly ambitious but she's responsible and feels that the public has the right to know whatever she herself knows.An unscrupulous local law-enforcement officer, Bob Balaban, decides to harass Paul Newman, bootlegger's son but innocent of any wrongdoing, in connection with the disappearance of a union organizer. In an interview with Field, Balaban leaves a folder containing the case against Newman conspicuously on his desk, then tells Fields he's going away and she should make herself at home. It's an invitation to read some documents that the law forbids him to reveal.Complications ensue. There is a death that results from Field's honest but ruthless reporting. And things gets really confusing -- I HOPE -- because somewhere along the line I found myself leaping around blindly in all directions trying to follow the plot.The jactitations reminded me of something else -- all my home theater equipment. See, the units themselves -- the DVD and tape players, the amplifier -- they're all black. So are the buttons. And so is much of the tiny printing. In the subdued lighting of the vast living room here in the trailer I call home, you can't see or read the buttons or the print. You know why? I'll tell you why. Because the whole Geschaft was designed by a bunch of moss-covered technicians in a brightly lighted room with all the equipment on eye-level shelves. They can read all the details of the black print on the black face plate and interpret all of the complicated carbuncles on the rear. Fine in a laboratory, a headache at home.I had the same feeling about this plot, with all its criss-crossing motives and correlated conundrums. The writers and the director -- Sidney Pollack, whose work I admire -- and the script doctors must have gone over the story multiple times until they had all the rip currents memorized. Then they plunged ahead with a story that makes Raymond Chandler look like a model of expositional clarity.And frankly Paul Newman, another whose work elsewhere I've admired, is no help. When he doesn't sink his teeth into a role, nothing much comes of his performance, and with the exception of one scene that's the case here. Sally Field is okay, cute thing that she is. The best performance, perhaps, is Melinda Dillon's as the pathetic, weak school principal. At least she gets to go crazy, running from lawn to lawn in her nightgown, trying to pick up every newspaper on every front yard in the city of Miami. Next best performance: Bob Balaban as the unflappable slime ball who starts the whole tale.It's too bad so much was lost. Journalistic ethics have become more important an issue now than they were when this film was released -- a few years after the wildly successful "All The President's Men." Newspapers have the time and resources for in-depth reportage, in a way that even 24/7 cable news channels do not. They maintain permanent bureaus in places like Madrid, even when nothing is going on. They have facilities to investigate more than sexual peccadilloes. Lamentably, the way things are going we will be left with two newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And after that? Sixty-second sound bites to be played over and over, and hour-long opinion journalists telling us what think the sound bites meant.