Better Late Then Never

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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.

It was thrilling, moving and at times startling to look into Charlotte Rampling's faces, all of them. For me, an added plus because only a few weeks ago I heard director Martin Donovan at a lecture talking about her. He described her as a fearless artist who forged her own path in the most unconventional way. He also confessed that she as one of the actresses he dreamed to work with and, he added, "I haven't given up on that dream". The Look" confirms Donovan's theory in spades. Confronting her own fears seems to be her mantra. Her face, unique. Woody Allen dedicated her a full segment of riveting close ups in "Stardust Memories" and the cold intellectualism of Liliana Cavani put her through a torturous road of sado-masochism in "The Night Porter" If you love acting and films, you can't afford to miss "The Look"

This review was written after a screening at Cambridge Film Festival (UK) - 15 to 25 September, the Festival's closing film * Contains spoilers * There is not much to say about The Look, not because it is not good, but because it is worth watching, rather than talking about. A good documentary cannot be summed up (and, counter to this sense, I had been trying to remember the headings under which each section of the film falls), but has told or, as here, shown you something about the truth.Even if the viewer has somehow never heard of Charlotte Rampling, I believe that he or she, quite apart from the fact that clips are shown from a number of her films, would want to go on to discover some of them. (Where I know her best from is Woody Allen's misunderstood (at the time) Stardust Memories, where she was mad and desirable as Dorrie, and the first time that I had heard the term 'basket case' (one of Alvy's voices describing her.) The sections were headed with titles as large, but not actually as invading, as exposure, beauty, sex, death, life and two or so others: each was the introduction to Rampling in communion with someone whom she know, so, first, being photographed by and photographing Peter Lindbergh in an unfinished / unfurnished top-floor space in what was probably Paris, talking about what that meant to her and to him. Already, a very great entrée into hearing what Rampling said about herself and her look. Then talking to writer Paul Auster in a remarkable maritime location, etc.The film had really one flaw, which was that it dragged towards the end: the sections at the end could just have been a little tighter, because I was not alone in finding that the attention was slipping. Indeed, one short scene, where Rampling has something and nothing of meeting up with one of her contacts (after an atmospheric call from a deli to try to arrange it), could just have been dropped all together. The judgement seemed to have been taken to include it, when it might better have been made to leave it out.