Best movie of this year hands down!

So much average

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Roman Polanski does something that is not easy here: he transfers a play to the screen, and never lets you forget that it is a play you're watching, but he makes it completely cinematic at the same time. The play itself is a great enigma about truth, doubt, vigilantism and justice. I don't want to give away the ending, but it is masterfully designed and executed. It's an intense and compelling film, the kind that invites long debates after it's over. The three leads are perfectly cast: Weaver and Kingsley are at the peak of their powers, but Wilson is much more than just "a third wheel". *** out of 4.

I've seen this twice and the impact was no less the second time. It's a story about power, the abuse of it, the search for justice and relationships. I'm in awe of Weaver's acting ability. Yes, it's a great role but she makes it that. She is a queen in my opinion; she mesmerizes. And the interplay between the three actors is such that even though there are moments when it is difficult to continue watching, you cannot look away.This film shows some very real glimpses into the worst of our human nature and the deepest part of who we are in our quest for peace and resolution.

Considering that this is a play and rather looks like one, it's pretty good. Well, it's good anyway.A lawyer, Gerardo (Stuart Wilson) and his wife Paulina (Sigourney Weaver) have just retired in their comfortable, isolated house next to a cliff overhanging the sea. The location is somewhere in South America, in a country that has just emerged from despotism and become a democracy. A car has trouble on the road in front of their house. Dr. Miranda (Ben Kingsley) rouses them and asks for help, but an electrical storm has knocked out both the power and the phone.Gerardo and Dr. Miranda are chatting in the living room while Paulina is still in bed. Hearing Miranda's voice, she sits up in alarm, sneaks outside, burns off in Miranda's car and pushes it over a cliff.That, I guess, is the end of Act I. Most of the time we spend with Gerardo and Miranda in the living room. The two men are at loose ends and drink themselves into a cheerfully befuddled state. I can't remember many drunk scenes better than this one. Kingsley, in particular, is given marvelous lines and delivers them as if they were gifts to the audience -- cynical, ironic, high brow, amiable. "I would like to quote Nietzsche in a situation like this," says Kingsley. "At least I think it was Nietzsche. Maybe it was Freud." Gerardo, "If you can remember a quotation, it's usually Freud." The dialog is delicious and matter of fact. The two men are sitting on the porch steps, still thinking Paulina is asleep, musing about where a thief might have driven Miranda's car, and why. "I'm an idiot," says Kingsley. "I'm running down the road yelling 'That's my car!' Of course the thief knows that. That's the whole POINT." Later, when they find out that Paulina has stolen the car, "I mean, what is this -- a regular thing or what? How long do you think we might have to wait? A day or two? A month?" Then the humor dwindles to a palpitating point and vanishes, and the movie becomes echt-serious. Paulina claims that Miranda worked as an interrogator for the now-deposed dictatorship and that he beat, tortured, and raped the women who were his prisoners -- Paulina included. (She's explicit about the techniques.) Gerardo thinks she's crazy. Miranda is astonished and scared to death.Paulina has Miranda tied up and puts him on trial, appointing Gerardo his defense counsel. Some "trial"! If Miranda confesses and shows genuine contrition she'll let him go, otherwise she'll shoot him through the head. Miranda, sensibly, is perfectly willing to confess and get out of this mad house but, since he claims to have had nothing to do with the previous regime, he doesn't know what to confess to. Paulina wants details -- what was she tied up with, ropes or wires? -- that Miranda says he is unable to provide.It's a harrowing movie, with occasional arcs of electricity jumping through it. I'm not certain the ending is played exactly as it would be in real life, but it hardly matters because the acting on the part of all three principals is unimpeachable.I don't want to give away the climax but I'll sum up my impression by saying that it's quite possible to be guilty OR innocent, while still being mad.See it if you can. It's a hard film to forget.

Death and the Maiden is one of those darkly comfortable films where the opening moments are so intriguing and spot-on perfect that almost any continuation would be a disappointment. But, alas, movies have to be about something, and so slowly the purity of the situation settles as carefully as it can into the decisively paced story.Sigourney Weaver plays an intuitive and imperious specimen, a troubled housewife, playing her as a woman performing rather than personifying her traditionally feminine position. She is married to a renowned lawyer in an unclarified South American country. One night, a storm forces her husband, played by Stuart Wilson, to ride home with a kind stranger, played by Ben Kingsley. That is the exposition for this absorbing film, directed by Roman Polanski, a natural player in the realm of this story, based on a play by Chilean exile Ariel Dorfman, and clearly so. In the movie's lingering dark of the heart, Kingsley, crudely tied to a chair, will claim his innocence. Weaver will taunt him and interrogate him. And Wilson, her husband, will shudder first in one direction and then in the other, because this doctor is a pleasant and harmlessly polite man and a very intelligent one, and if there is a way for him to talk his way to freedom, he will realize it.This atmospheric drama is, somewhat, on the subject of real shame: Is this the man who raped and tortured her? To some extent, it concerns the character of guilt and its function in one's identity: If this is the same guy, maybe he has changed. Was he a product of the times or a victim of them? If he is guilty, does he atone? Is his crime forgivable to the human standard? Is the woman's husband somehow hindered by a male bonding with this man allegedly hostile to women? All of these reservations lie in wait provocatively beneath the brooding facade of this masterpiece, enriching and intensifying its insatiably vindictive story, which oddly enough is not so much about whether or not this is the man who tortured her, but about the unpredictability of Weaver's behavior, if she really knows what she's doing, if she has an idea of what she will do if she is right and he is in fact her scarring tormentor.The whole story leads up to a moving, unforgettable three-minute monologue by the doctor, giftedly delivered by Kingsley, so that we have to resolve not only the issue of his guilt or innocence in this makeshift trial, but the issue of its value. It is at this stirring climax that one can truly say that this minor string quartet-based masterpiece of claustrophobia is all as regards acting. Kingsley here can compare to the best of the rest of his work with his shrewd performance: He makes his character so smart that whether he's guilty or not, we have a definite appreciation for his struggle, and thus he not only fleshes out the character in Dorfman's drama but also heightens the drama without compromising anything about the script. Another actor, even one just as gifted, may easily have lacked the creative initiative to compel the character as such, a pivotal one at the core of the story.Moreover, without the Sigourney Weaver performance, the film could easily have been a lot less impactful. There must have been the pull to emphasize the years-pent rage of her character, but she not only brings so many other colors to this apparent maven, but understands that in a character who is seeking revenge, less is more, because less can be a whole lot more fulfilling in its jeering and mischief. Characterization is a side-effect that emanates from action and dialogue, and there are times, during the dialogue, when the film certainly clues us into its stage origins, when we feel we have almost been carried back to the tangible events she recalls. And Polanski uses the camera in these time-transcendent moments as a spectator, standing facing her and listening, just as one may want to even when seeing this performed on stage.The conflicted lawyer is credibly by Wilson as a man who would sincerely love to discern the truth, he is a deputy for the audience, the character whose feelings we share when he listens to Weaver's horror stories through Polanski's camera's eyes. But she and Kingsley both know that no jury can satisfy, or grasp, the personality of the circumstances. No more than the torturer and the tortured have shared that information, and perhaps only by changing places can they understand it, and that is what justifies her actions to anyone in the audience, even those who starkly oppose the concept of revenge.