Well Deserved Praise

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Unfortunately the plot is full of interesting ideas thrown together with no internal logic, so that the story is just dumb.Just one example - (may contain spoilers if you have not read any of the other reviews.) Towards the end Arquette's character suggests to the audience that they are wrong to try and believe in some other life and that what if there is only this and shouldn't we live for it.A fine and noble thought - but hardly likely to be voiced by a character that is in herself providing proof that there is something more. Since she has discovered that she is getting true messages from beyond, she would be far more likely to say at this stage that maybe once it was all an act but now she is compelled to believe in a next life ...And then at the end she sits in a chair and disappears .., so if she was a ghost why the hell was she doing the act for her father and getting upset by it and worried about their money... not to mention screwing around ... Or was she just a regular human vulnerable girl for most of the movie (and this acted brilliantly) and then transformed suddenly into a ghost in that chair, or did she suddenly learn teleportation ...Fuzzy, insultingly sloppy thinking ruins what could have been a really good movie.

"Black Rainbow" is an uncategorizable film: an unusual and ambitious mix of such different genres as metaphysical horror, corruption/conspiracy thriller, family drama, even a backstage look at the way evangelist/medium "shows" are set up. The mix doesn't always work (the ending, for example, is not consistent with some of the previous events), but the movie is still definitely worth seeing. There are at least two or three brilliant scenes (the most notable of which is, arguably, the way Hodges "films" an explosion without actually showing it), and Rosanna Arquette gives an impressive performance. (***)

Black Rainbow is like most of Mike Hodges films: Get Carter, Croupier and Terminal Man, very intelligent. It is great performance byRosanna Arquette best ever. Also Jason Robards and Tom Hulce are also good.I doesn't rely on special effects to tell a story. It is more or less dealing with whether or not (Martha Travis) Rosanna Arquette is telling the truth. What I found interesting is how Hodges creates a psychological atmosphere on what would happen if someone with that psychic power tells you somebody close to you is dead. That is more disturbing than any special effect.It is a shame Black Rainbow didn't get a proper cinema release. According to Mike Hodges on the DVD commentary of Black Rainbow, both the distributors Palace Pictures (UK) & Miramax (USA) were both suffering financially. Palace Pictures only released the in minimum cinemas, because they were on the verge of getting bankrupt. Miramax decided to release it straight to television.My opinion is this is great film and should get a chance, any interested in this film, its out on DVD on Anchor Bay on Region 2

The script is filled with a series of chilling twists which Hodges plays with an absolute and certain confidence - the eeriness as Arquette's first vision starts to come, and her agitation and attempts to cover as what she is performing turns to real; the second vision where she reels off a list of names of the dead trying to contact the living and said people still alive in the audience start standing up puzzled. Hodges' depiction of a seedy con-job slowly becoming darker is beautifully written. The imagery as Arquette's vistas of heavenly meadows and tranquil afterlife cliches start to change into impressions of cancers, empty lives and of people suffering is a stunning and powerful one. The final soliloquy Arquette gives, coming out to taunt the audience - how they want there to be an afterlife so they can confirm their own lives, how if there wasn't an afterlife and what they had was all that they were given, then wouldn't that make her a fake ? - is superbly written and utterly rivetting in delivery. Arquette's performance in the film is exceptional.