Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

The acting in this movie is really good.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The source book was a satire on a truly dreadful author of the late 19th century, a sort of Barbara Cartland, but only more schlocky. If the intent was to have fun on this idea it was missed and badly; if it was taken at face value, it is a sign of incipient idiocy.It plays the whole thing very straight and it seems as if no one saw that this is utter complete trash. Douglas Sirk used to take rubbish - real mediocre uneducated garbage - and make a thing with it as Fassbinder extolled him for doing. It looks as if Ozon has done a Fassbinder and taken real nonsense, which has become a joke cliché of romantic fiction and not seen that it had always been a joke; a wry in-joke on the reader, and on the original writer.Why anyone ever signed up to do this is curious - apart form the money. Why it was financed is even more puzzling. No doubt people will watch this in 10 and 50 years and see something else altogether but none of it will do anything for the creative team behind this.The classic, "Cold Comfort Farm" was a parody of the romantic rural fiction popular in the early 20th century and this work is a roman a clef of the same type of demotic garbage that is consumed in bulk.Under no circumstances go anywhere near this and wipe all playback technologies that may have accessed it.

Something about the movie made me think of Grey Gardens...maybe it's the fact there were so many cats at the end or that the "heroine" lived in her mind so much....But like Grey Gardens, I loved the movie! Speaks volumes about our eccentricities :-).The movie as dinged for being "fake" in its cinematography. However, let's look at the character of Angel. She is a pathetic, sad, girl who lives in her mind....she was not happy with the life she was given, so she makes her own. In one part, you have to admire her for her ability to make her own world - the amount of work and "talent" to do so is unbelievable! However, she is uncompromising in how she wants her life to be....and in the end no one is able to live up to her expectations and this in turn is what is her downfall.... Back to the cinematography. You will notice that when her "real" life is carrying on more like a romance novel - i.e. when her publisher takes her on a carriage ride after signing her on, her fist kiss with Esme, her honeymoon - the syrupy fake cinematography happens. Perhaps it is all in her mind...? Because, let's face it, reality is never really this way! Esme's painting style is so different than her writing. She wants to live a life of beauty - quite opposite of him. They both have self-loathing, but manifest it in very different ways. There is more to be said, but I think it is a good character analysis piece.This movie is both funny and sad. Great piece!

A girl has a right to dream. At the beginning of the XX century not much else is guaranteed to a young and frail schoolchild. The wild and uncouth Angel (played by Romola Garai) however has a different outlook, as her dreams are not fantasies, but a prediction of the future. Immensely talented as a writer, despite shallow contempt to reading books, Angel is all-in-all a literary hack with an undeniable way with words and romance. At an early age she is discovered by a publisher Théo (Sam Neill), who becomes so fascinated with her writings, that he agrees to release her first book to critical and commercial acclaim. Angel uses the newly found fame and wealth to purchase her dream house Paradise, marry the man of her desires and become a larger than life as if straight from her novels...Francois Ozon tackles the whole movie with an unmistakable signature delving into the epoque with wit and charm encapsulated by the character of Angel. Multilayered and hard to crack she is presented as an alternative type of rebel without a cause, absolutely engulfed by her own brilliance, that she is unable to break out of her shell to take a gulp of reality. Once she molds her dream-life she seems to believe that this is the end of the story, her life has reached perfection and no further chapters need be written. However the barrier she builds around herself becomes a prison from where she struggles to see that her perfect life is more a projection of her expectations into reality than reality itself.All in all an interesting concept and to a point well contrived. At some stages the movie uses an absolutely pathetic excuse for backgrounds, i.e. while riding in a carriage across London we she varying landmarks of the city rudely apparent to be fake, to highlight the audacity of Angel's dream-life, as if taken from a romance novel. Nonetheless the movie falters in creating a mood to coincide with the premise of the story. Throughout the movie Angel is a hysterically overplayed and pretentious character, which draws multiple laughs in the most awkward situations, i.e. whilst reading her husband's eulogy or when drawing her last breath before death. This odes of course give the movie a certain whiff of freshness, as Angel's eccentrics really get you interested in her character (however unlikeable she may be). Nonetheless this was taken to such an extreme that at times I was unsure whether "Angel" is essentially a pastiche of costume dramas, with a by the numbers script full with often hilarious scenes, as if making fun of the whole genre and its dramatics.All in all an enjoyable movie, but the awkwardness of the permeating funniness of Angel and her undergoing together with the lack of clarity as to the intentions of the director make the eventual reaction to it a meandering mess of drama, comedy and rushed narrative.

This movie is rubbish. The only good aspect was that my wife won our tickets, so we didn't have to part with good money to see it.Nothing worked for me. The characterisations were poor. Sam Neill (as always) played Sam Neill and even Charlotte Rampling (for whom I have great admiration) couldn't save the film. I can only compare it to Titanic - not the movie but the ship.Who was Angelica? I know she had something to do with Paradise (which was shown in reverse over the gate of the house right at the beginning, but the right way around for the rest of the movie), but, as a character, she wasn't introduced. Was this edited out, or was I in a coma at the time and missed it? What went wrong with the background shots? Alfred Hitchcock did a better job of them in the 60s. How can it be that, with all the modern technology, it was so obvious and poor? I quite simply did not believe any of it. One man after the movie came up to my wife and myself with a bemused smile on his face and asked, "What was that all about?" He said he was expecting Angel to wake up and find it all a dream. My comment in reply, "Mas more like a nightmare" The only thing I found even remotely interesting was the way Esme used the wheelchair Angel gave him to hang himself from. This gives some idea as to how boring I found the rest! I suffered the movie expecting my wife to say that she found it moving (i.e. I thought it had to be a "chick flick" that only women can enjoy). Meanwhile, Barbara sat through it thinking that I must have found something "arty" about it. If we had only known, we could have walked out and not had to endure the torture.I could not, in all consciousness, recommend this movie - even to a person I hate.None of it worked; none of it inspired; none of it entertained. It was even too horrible to be amusing.