One of my all time favorites.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Death humbles us all. LOOK BOTH WAYS is an uncompromising look at death. (Ignore the cover art: it suggests a comedy, which this movie most definitely is not.) The news, received just a few years ago, that my wife has cancer, was the kind of news that undoes hinges. Still reeling from the blow, I was advised that my mother had lung cancer (she left this world in April). My own mortality was already a given (a collapse and a heart attack and quintuple bypass heart surgery had left me with the sneaking suspicion that I may not be long for this world). All of this was difficult to deal with (to say the very least). LOOK BOTH WAYS was, in its own way, very therapeutic. I felt much better, afterward, having seen it. If you're one of those of us who have had to come face to pale white face with the harshest of realities, I recommend you sit down and watch LOOK BOTH WAYS.

I had never heard of this movie, but watched in on the IFC film channel. Did not recognize any of the actors, but within the first 5 minutes I was hooked. Every day people, some of them getting various "shocking" news delivered to them....and how they deal with it and how their lives intersect. One of the main characters, a relatively young man, is told in the very beginning of the story that he has cancer....testicular and it's already spread to his lungs. You really feel for him, and relate to all the things he goes through (montage flashbacks of his life, thoughts about all the things he has done that could have caused the cancer, imaging it taking over his body, etc. There are various animated segments, but not too many to be distracting. All the characters seem very believable, and you want things to work out for them. Happily, for the most part they do. A real gem of an indie!

Great music. I am looking for some of the tracks used. A very nice film with humor about dealing with mortality and obsession and unanswerable questions. Definitely not a 'car-crash' movie, or a shoot-um-up. I particularly liked the recurrent seques with the trains and the birds. I also liked the landscape of a smaller town Australia (identified as Adeliade in the extras on the DVD. Something that I missed the first time through-- the widow and the engineer never speak. If you liked this, try "Off The Map" with Joan Allen, or if you liked 'Off The Map' you'll probably like this. This movie has a darker 'feel' but has the same portrayal of grace and growth.

Here's the latest entry in the "web-of-life, luck, and loss" film derby that has recently become either an overheated fashion among filmmakers or an emerging genre, depending upon how you look at it.Two things make this one more noteworthy than most of its ilk. The characters are nearly all distinctively etched, yet none is an oddball, someone cooked up merely for eccentricity's sake. And the writer-director, Sarah Watt, has succeeded brilliantly in one of the toughest tasks in film-making: representing the inner experience of people – their thoughts and fantasies – visually, cinematically, without resort to soliloquies, dialogue or voiceovers to convey such interior events.Ms. Watt has been making short animated films for over 15 years, and she uses her animation skills to great advantage in this, her first feature length, narrative movie. She concentrates her efforts toward interiority on the two most central characters (there are about a dozen altogether), and so will I. Meryl (Justine Clarke) is a water colorist by avocation. Her father died just two weeks ago. Then she witnesses a man struck dead by a passing freight train.In the wake of these events and another unconnected to her, a horrific train accident elsewhere in the country, Meryl begins to imagine brief catastrophic scenes at every turn, in which she herself dies a violent death. We are shown these flashes of vivid visual imagery, which always take the form of animated watercolor paintings, in a style like those she makes in her spare time (this is where Ms. Watts's animation skills come into play).Nick (William McInnes) is a photographer with the local paper who covers the accidental death caused by the freight train that Meryl witnessed. His father died about a year ago. And he has learned only today, the day of the accident, that he has testicular cancer. We witness his preoccupation with his condition, which, quite appropriately, takes the form of vivid colored still photos of his cancer, shown in rapid succession, and moving pictures of tumor proliferation and the like. He also begins to notice skin lesions and other evidence of abnormalities or illness in other people, and, again, we see in photographic images Nick's preoccupying fantasies about the decline of these people that he imagines.Meryl and Nick eventually become a couple near the end, though only through pure luck does one of them avoid probable sudden death. I won't wear you out by trying to recount the other characters and their stories. But they are absorbing, especially the angry, grieving partner of the man killed by the train, the devastated train engineer, and a hotheaded reporter colleague of Nick's and the two women in his life.The film is not without problems. In flashbacks, Nick's Dad talks directly into the camera to us a few times; these are unwise and disconcerting little scenes that should have been left on the editing floor. The photography is undistinguished, apart from the fantasy scenes, as is the soundtrack. That said, I think Ms. Watt has real promise as a narrative film director; she appears to work well with actors, and her own imagination shines. My grade: A- 9/10.