It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

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

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

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I had never heard of this film, nor did I read anything about it on IMDb beforehand, so I had no expectations whatsoever when I sat down for it. By 20 minutes in, I was enjoying it a lot. Michelle Williams was putting on a London accent which seemed flawless to me. (Okay, I'm a Texan, what do I know about English accents?) The big event seemed to be done pretty well. The film is mainly psychological, about dealing with loss. Miss Williams does very well with this material, and indeed, her performance is the best part of the film. But when I got into the final third of the film, my enjoyment started to flag. The flashback scenes were way overdone, even though I get that it was the director's way of showing the character's break with reality. And in the end, the character's shocking naivete about the mindset of Islamic terrorists was extremely jarring. Overall, I liked the movie, but I am not sure that I could recommend it to anyone else.

I would think the book probably better than the movie although I never read it. The movie lost its focus half-way through. This movie never made into the mainstream release. Over the top terrorist plot might have some bearings. The director possibly thought it reflected the current events. However, it became avoidable by the audience. I also think it could do without to make the storyline whole. There were a lot of borrowing ideas all over the places. It's like I was watching "Dark Places" again. Sometimes, you have to trim the branches to help the tree to grow. Some reviews did not like American actress playing the lead role. I would say the studio had it released in the US in mind and with the American taking on the lead role would draw the audience. It just never made that far. It cost a lot to make the explosive scenes. I felt it was totally a waste. If they just stuck on the love scenes, that might help to get into the main distribution.Adapting the events bigger than the screen could carry is not feasible. This one is an example of it.

You should definitely read the book instead. Some of the characters of great importance for the story is either written out or payed no attention to in the movie. Which is really a pity and also twists the basic story so it will never reach the level the books does. I was well disappointed as well to see an American actress hold the leading role. A Dawsons Creek actress -how did they ever come up with that? When the book was to come out, the big attack in London occurred and due to the many similarities of the fictive story and what happened in real life, they had to take the retract the book and postpone it's release for a year or so. I very much recommend the book, but the movie will only ruin it for you.

A young mother sees her husband and four-year old son off to a soccer match. She then goes home and puts the match on the television. As she watches there are explosions at the stadium. A terrorist attack kills her husband, who she didn't much like anyway, and her son, who she loved dearly, along with a thousand or so others. Oh, and as the young mother watches this unfold on the television screen she is at that moment having sex with another man.This seems to set up a story about the young mother's guilt and grief. And there's some of that. But there's a bunch of other stuff too, none of which really works. There are conspiracy thriller elements which go practically nowhere. There are romantic entanglements as a couple of men who should really know better try to swoop in on the newly widowed young mother. In a portion of the film which strains credulity to the breaking point we see the young mother reach out to the son of one of the suicide bombers. The film goes off in so many different directions that it ends up being quite a mess. The young mother manages to hold herself together remarkably well given the circumstances. For a while anyway. But eventually she starts to crack and when she does the movie cracks too. At this point it is beyond repair.If there is anything positive to say it is that, working from a rather lousy script, Michelle Williams still does remarkably well in the role of the young mother. Whatever little successes this movie has belong to Williams. Ewan McGregor is at least passable as one of her suitors. As the other Matthew Macfadyen is a total dud and he also draws the shortest straw, getting the absolute worst of all the film's terrible dialogue. Some of the things this character says are just laughably, impossibly bad. He speaks in a way human beings simply do not speak. The film aims for melodrama but misses the mark. The story doesn't really engage and it moves at a snail's pace. A story more focused on the mother herself and the way she coped with this tragedy might have worked. But this movie gets bogged down as it veers off in other directions. Williams does the best she can but her noble effort can't save this dud.