The Worst Film Ever

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

This movie could have been great! The cast (all besides the leading role, Angel, awfully played by Romola Garai) is excellent. Fassbender and Charlotte Rampling are superb. If you are a Fassbender's fan, it is worth to watch the movie, because his performance of Esmé is AMAZING. Garai's performance, on the contrary, is SO BAD, fake and exaggerated that the whole movie turns into a parody. Every single moment that she is acting, she is overacting. It's awful to watch. She is like a cheap Scarlett O'Hara. The design of the credits is really tacky (all pink and ugly) and it gives a feeling of watching a cheap soap opera. I almost never write negative reviews, unless the movie really annoyed me. So, sorry, amazing Fassbender, but I had to write this review. It is really a pity, because the movie could have been a great, but Garai really destroys it.

I have to say that after I started to watch this movie I was not sure whether I would be able to finish it. The heroine is so unlikeable to me at first, she is completely detached from the reality. But as I got through the first half-hour, I must say that this is a brilliant movie that touched me to my very core. In a sense it is like 8 femmes - you see only blue skies and you do not realise something is wrong at first but you have this creepy feeling all the time (it cannot go on like that forever, right?). And before you know it, there is a storm so strong that you can barely keep up and the whole perfect world falls apart like the house of cards. I must especially point out the performances by Romola Garai and Michael Fassbender who did an AMAZING job but it would not feel right to leave out all the other supporting actors who made the story complete - Sam Neill and Lucy Russell. This movie reminds me of the Wurthering Heights by Emily Bronte and has everything I seek in a film - bunch of extremely talented people working together with absolute precision, marvelous costume and stages and above all - very deep idea that sticks with you even after the final credits are rolled and makes you think how tricky the life can be... Brava!

My advice would be don't waste your time with this film.Large chunks were clearly meant to be ironic but much was also meant to be more darkly realistic. The result was a wildly veering mish-mash of genres which the director failed to navigate successfully.Overall, the film felt like a mix between a 1940s melodrama and a 1970s made-for-TV two-part series, with a loathsome central character.Two people in our group of 20 loved the film, so it must have something going for it. The rest of us were desperate for it to be over from about 20 minutes in. At one point, the main character gets sick, and from behind me and beside me I heard simultaneous mutters of "please die" and "thank god". That was exactly how I felt.I am sure the film was making all kinds of comments about art, literature, characterization etc etc but it all went sailing over my head. Driving home, I said as much to my flatmate, and he paraphrased Bill Hicks to me: "The film was bad. Don't get suckered into believing it actually saying something complex and clever. It was bad. Leave it at that and walk away".

What a disappointment. It's hard to know what attracted Ozon to Elizabeth Taylor's fantastic source novel as his adaptation is misjudged on a number of levels. Although he slavishly sticks to Taylor's plot, Ozon has real problems with - or chooses to ignore - the very things that are at the heart of the novel. Taylor's ironic, often cruel wit is missing. Characters are softened in the way one would expect of Hollywood, but not of French cinema. He doesn't seem able to master Taylor's irony at all - the audience at last night's London Film Festival screening were very confused about where and when they should laugh. It was impossible to know what the director felt about the characters. Almost entirely missing was Taylor's exceptional portrait of class - one of the major themes of the novel. The film felt like a classic Europudding - rootless in an implausible world. There was very little sense of being in Edwardian Britain.The film is overwrought and out of control. If I hadn't already read the novel, I would have been completely puzzled by what I was watching and how I was supposed to respond or feel.