It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Yeah this was a pretty depressing movie about a grief stricken couple who find chaos and comfort when they reluctantly take in a young woman (Cary Mulligan) who claims to be pregnant with the baby of their recently deceased son. It's filled with such great acting though, -and not just from the obvious (Pierce Brosnan & Susan Sarandon) so that you really get pulled into the story.The family is such a mess after the death of their son that its almost painful to watch. Sarandon's character becomes a selfish bitch, for lack of a better word and Allen (Brosnan) just shuts down altogether. They both refuse to see the gift that is right in front of them in their sons unborn baby and his girlfriend who is just crying out for love and full of questions. I also enjoyed watching the younger brother deal with not only his brothers death but the decline of his parents and family as a whole. 08.13

The death of Bennett Brewer, a popular teenager is at the center of this story. We watch as he and his girlfriend Rose are making love. Taking her back home, Bennett makes a tactical mistake in stopping in the middle of a road to declare how much he loves her and how deeply he has fallen in love for her. Unfortunately, it is at this moment when a truck comes out of nowhere, crashing against the car. Bennett is killed after staying alive for seventeen minutes.We watch the distraught parents at the grave site. Rose, with an arm on a sling, comes to the funeral, but she stays out of the picture. Going home, in the limo, we see Grace and Allen Brewer with their other son, Ryan, sitting in stone silence. Never do we see these people comforting one another, much less talk about the tragedy that is changing their lives forever.Speed forward to three months after Bennett's death, when a pregnant Rose shows up at the Brewers. Mysteriously, this teenager has no one in the world, or so it appears. Later on, we learn she has a mother somewhere. Allen is sympathetic to what Rose is experiencing. Grace, on the other hand, wishes this intruder could be the one that had died, not her beloved Bennett.The problem with "The Greatest" lays in the way the screenplay by Shana Feste, who also directed, does not make too much sense. One can make excuses for certain liberties most filmmakers take, but it is inconceivable the situation caused when Rose decide to crash with her would be in-laws, and better yet, that they went along with taking this stranger they knew nothing about into their midst. There are things that have been presented in a better way in films on this subject.Susan Sarandon is asked to do another one of her bereaved mothers trying to cope with a big loss, something we have already seen her do, to much better results, one must add. Pierce Brosnan, whose company produced the film, and is listed as one of the people responsible for the film, shows a much vulnerable side. His Allen is carrying a lot of guilt inside him because of his involvement with a colleague. Carry Mulligan, impressive in other films where she has appeared, does not elicit the viewer's sympathy, perhaps because of the way Ms. Feste conceived her character, or the direction given to her. Michael Shannon, an interesting actor, shows up in a small role toward the end.

"The Greatest" is a little known film, similar in theme to the more recent and somewhat better "Rabbit Hole", that is how a family deals with the loss of a teenage son. I watched this on Netflix, where it was predicted I would like it, as I generally like dramas about families dealing with serious problems. But it became evident almost from the start that this film was not going to be what I had hoped for.The cast was excellent, the parents played by Susan Sarandon and Pierce Brosnan, and Carey Mulligan from "An Education". The problem with the film was the writing and directing, which happened to be the same person, Shana Feste, directing her first film, and her inexperience showed.Right away after leaving the funeral, the camera remains on the two grieving parents for at least 3 minutes with no dialog or changes of expression. Then the girlfriend (Mulligan) shows up knocking on the parents door telling them she is pregnant with their son's baby. And she wants to stay with them! They had only the one date it seems, and had sex, and she says she didn't know you could get pregnant the first time. This would be okay if she were 14 maybe, but not 18 at least. Now Susan Sarandon has decided to blame Mulligan, rather than embrace her, and her husband seems to want to almost pretend that nothing happened, all situations that seem more manufactured for dramatic impact than believability.It is only fair to mention that some of the scenes played very well, even if they didn't follow coherently from what came before. For example, when the younger brother, a druggie who seems to be able to quit awfully easily while seemingly unaffected by his brother's death, suddenly decides to bare his soul at a support group therapy session. His talk to the group moved me to a tear or two unexpectedly, but again seemed to happen too conveniently, in order to move the story along.Were this film made by someone in his or her teens, I could forgive the above problems, but this was definitely made by adults, for adults, and needed some serious revisions in the script and some scenes. I actually found myself laughing a couple of times at how ludicrous some sequences appeared. But because the story had some interesting elements, and some scenes were well done and affecting, I gave this film a generous 5 out of 10. What should have been a fine film was barely okay, and judging from some of the other reviews, many will overlook these shortcomings because as a tearjerker, it often succeeds.

I kind of cried a lot of times during the movie... (* embarrassed*) Really touched me how the small moments and the acting came through. The huge emotional hardships... The hurting... The missing moments that was missing by mistakes of someone... The problems we arise ourselves with our human small-mindedness... This movie makes you realize how f*ed up we are, and still, we can do so much more... and when we LOVE! ... if we LOVE and we give a chance to each other within our really screwed up world, we can fix everything, and give hope to each other for a better future and for each other to make things right...Every little seconds passed in this movie, was visible on their (actor's) face that counts a lot for me in this move.Will watch it again thats for sure!