Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

There is a story about two brothers. The first one is full of confidence and ambitions, the second one is a weak gambler. Both of them have some difficulties with money and the solution comes just in time. The question of moral was played really interesting in this movie. An idea of two brothers on the different sides of the attitude towards murder is just great. I am always really involved in the subject like that, enjoy watching argues on such an issue. That is why I think that this movie is certainly intellectual and interesting. However, the end is, as usually, boring and predictable. I wish I could change it to the Match Point end. It will be far more interesting - just dispose of this *Crime and Punishment* capstone of modern cinema.Woody should cross the line, show us more unpunished blood. That is what I would certainly want to watch.

Woody Allen sticks with thrillers after the brilliant "Match Point" and good "Scoop". This doesn't measure up to either, but is decent enough nonetheless. Is very good for the most part. Allen takes his time to set the scene and sketch the characters, but it isn't boring or contrived. The story moves along smoothly and effortlessly. However, the ending felt rushed, and a bit predictable. After the slow build up, the pacing was inconsistent. Felt a bit flat, and left down, at the end, as I was expecting a more left field or symbolic ending.Good acting from Colin Farrell, especially, and Ewan McGregor.

So I've been on a binge of less than amazing Woody Allen films in the past few days. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Scoop and finally Cassandra's Dream. All set in London, they all suffer from essentially the same issues, but I'll focus on the last one here.The single biggest problem here is Woody Allen's most unique feature; his incredible speed. Reading the book 'Conversations with Woody Allen' confirms that most of these films were written in a rush based on a selection of single ideas, I think Cassandra's Dream in particular was written in 8-10 weeks or something. Which, of course, is incredibly impressive, but also painfully obvious after watching the film. Woody Allen is an ideas man; Cassandra's Dream is full of fantastic thoughts, plot details and nuances, but the problem is that hardly any of them are properly developed! The storyline is simply all over the place, there's so much information squeezed into this 108 minutes that you would think there wasn't a dull moment. Yet the first 20-30 establishing minutes are the furthest thing from captivating. We meet the two brothers, one too ambitious for his own good, the other a gambling addict, existing in a sort of idyllic pre-Event (in the psychoanalytical sense) bliss. But why waste so much of the film on this when we're dealing with archetypes anyway? There's so much superfluous information that adds nothing to the story that I honestly wish Allen would decrease his rate of productivity and spend more time in the writing process. Take for example the boat; a criminally under-utilised plot-detail that I would wager was kept in the script mainly for the title's sake. Then there's the story of Ian (to me, an awfully artificial Ewen McGregor) meeting his girlfriend while out on a country drive with a previous girl; again, adds nothing to the story and could've easily been hinted at without wasting screen-time. Or the backdrop of the struggling family restaurant business; I suspect this was meant to heighten the pressure on our characters, but Ian keeps repeating he doesn't care about it and his father seems understanding over his long-term plan of abandoning it; so why complicate the plot with it in the first place?Overall, all three films feel more like plays than movies; every set could've been represented on stage easily. In fact this was something I was constantly conscious of during the film, which suggests to me that it really would be a more natural fit. Unfortunately, this being a film, the character's insistence to verbalise emotions that should honestly be beyond their scope often completely shatters the illusion. Speaking of illusion, I haven't even talked about the choice of words / accents yet (I'm not a stickler for such a thing, but I have to mention Collin Farrell slips up on the accent once in an almost comical way in a supposedly dramatic scene. Then there's the 1950s vocabulary of the apparently 20 year old girl played by Scarlet Johansson in Scoop).Overall, not a great effort. I would be more understanding if I thought Allen didn't care, but it's clear he was very proud of Match Point, so I wonder why he would not invest the time into perfecting these otherwise promising scripts. The ideas are there; it's the polish that's missing.

An oddity in the Woody Allen canon in many ways; while not a stinker, this brotherly drama listed as a thriller hardly thrills, and the suspense, while it holds the viewer to the screen is seldom intense; one watches, I think, mainly because the film is cast with some of the more interesting actors working today--Tom Wilkinson, Colin Farrell, and Ewan McGregor; the set-up is actually fairly ordinary for crime films, and one waits for director Allen to develop intensity in the situations; during the most heinous murder, for instance, little of its horror is communicated visually, leaving the viewer to wonder why one of the killers is suddenly having nightmares. Watching the film is not exactly time wasted, but I suspect you wont be rushing online to enthusiastically recommend it to a friend