Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

I checked this out because of the cover. IN the opening scenes, Glenn Close acts so well I sat through the rest of the film, even though she did only the intro and the outro. Her eccentric, somewhat blind old academic was a stereotype, but I won't discuss it further because it would turn into a spoiler. Suffice to say, much of the movie that came after went a little over the top, full of exaggerated conflicts and exaggerated emotions. The interesting part of the film is the structure. It's an ass-backward way to doing history. I imagine Close's character, who narrates the stories to her colleague, opened one can of worms in her investigation only to raise a question about an earlier time, and so on, and that's how she tells the story. A little confusing at first, but when I figured it out, I spent time after making the connections.. That's how it runs, and in that way, it's interesting.

This film is a history of a painting and the people who owned it over 300 years. It is told backwards through flashbacks, from its current owner, an eccentric art professor (Glenn Close) to its origin. Each chapter tells of the price they paid for their love of the painting. The individual stories are all involving, and there is a rather morbid twist at the very end you won't see coming. Two hours well-spent.

This made for TV movie presented by Hallmark was something I looked forward to seeing this Sunday, since it dealt with the painter Johannes Vermeer (a favorite painter of mine) and how a certain painting of his got in the hands of an eccentric woman and her father. The woman is Glenn Close, looking very mousy and spinster-ish, she tells the story to a young man (Thomas Gibson) of how that painting turned out to be in her family. The performance by Kelly Macdonald (Gosford Park) is the highlight of the movie as she plays it like a young Kate Winslet, with a lot of fire and mischief in her eyes. The performances were much better for an actuall theatrical release. Too bad the ending was rather lame, and left many questions unanswered about Glenn Close's character. Still, if you have a fascination with paintings and the stories behind them, this is truly a nice piece of Made for TV fanfare. If you still want more, watch the movie "The Red Violen" for a similiar story and intrigue.

I suffered through half this film before I switched to "Dr. Strangelove" on TCM. It is yet more proof that the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" has become hopelessly bad. Glenn Close misleadingly gets top billing, and delivers a magnificent performance, but she is in less than a third of the film. Her performance as an art enthusiast makes everyone else, including the usually reliable Ellyn Burstyn, seem even worse.The film, following the pattern of such films as "The Red Violin", tells the stories of several owners of a beautiful lost Vermeer painting through the centuries. Perhaps the producers of this mawkish telefilm were hoping that lightning would strike twice, but if so, they forgot the need for subtle writing and direction, which are both hopelessly sentimental and hardly above the level of soap opera in this film. Ms. Close, as if sensing this, gives a performance that wipes away everyone else. In fact, the acting, with the exception of Close, is uniformly bad, as if we were watching a bad daytime drama in period costume.The people who made this film obviously thought that by tackling an intellectual, sophisticated subject like a great Vermeer painting they could give the "Hallmark Hall of Fame" the class it once had, but they forgot to leave behind their recent tendency for corny writing and dramatics.