Very well executed

Best movie of this year hands down!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I decided to watch this with the great John hurt and the likeable elijah wood .It really is very dull and am so wanting to turn it off .But am intrigued as to who done it , trying g to stay awake for the next 46 minutes .

Philosophy, mathematics & logic, Oxford University, murder, intellectuals … all the components that one could hope for in a cerebral, cozy British murder mystery. I, like several others who have written reviews, had high hopes for what would be served up, but ended up disappointed.The genuinely famous "Fermat's Last Theorem" mysteriously became "Bormat's Last Theorem," which was somewhat indicative of much of the flimflam & fakery that enveloped the movie. The whole production was buried in pseudo intellectualism, name-dropping (numerous mathematicians, logicians & philosophers who would probably have preferred, like Fermat, that their names had been changed to protect their reputations) and contrived clues that depended on parsing a presumed mathematical/logical series. Beneath it all there was a plot that might have qualified for a mediocre episode of Midsomer Murders or Columbo, but would hardly engage the "little grey cells" of even Hercule Poirot. Martin (Elijah Wood) and Arthur Seldom (John Hurt) spend a good deal of their time shouting at one another (and various other people) in ersatz academic one-upmanship, apparently on the assumption that the louder you are, the more convincing your dubious thinking must be. More alarming, Martin felt compelled to dash from pillar to post every few minutes, frequently colliding with other people carrying books or papers that went flying in the air. Rather unconvincing romantic couplings and consequent jealousies seemed totally disconnected from the rest of the story. Towards the end we were even treated to a rather tepid car chase and fiery bus crash in a vain effort to heighten the drama.This is a case where less would have certainly been more. Too much was thrown in, in an attempt to elevate a trite and poorly concocted plot with a cloak of intellectualism and atmospherics. Too many unhinged and bipolar characters were floating about. It all seemed to be a hodgepodge of distractions aimed at concealing the absence of substance.It just never came together.

Never in one movie could I have expected to hear about the golden ratio, chaos theory, the Tractatus Logicus Filosoficus, coding theory, numerical series, fractal geometry, Fermat's conjecture, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the Liar Paradox, and the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem. One would think that I was watching something like A Beautiful Mind.But, this was a murder mystery - a hunt for a serial killer. But, was it? With philosophy, logic, and mathematics ever present, we can not be sure what it was.What is sure, that the selection of John Hurt to play the professor was brilliant. I could not imagine anyone else in that role, and he did it to perfection. I also have a greater appreciation for Elijah Wood after seeing this film. He really came through. I found a new actress to watch in Leonor Watling. I had seen her in a couple of Pedro Almodóvar's films, but didn't appreciate her at the time. I'll have to go back and re-watch them. One can never watch his films enough anyway. I'll have to re-watch another Almodovar film to see more work by writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría. Great music, too.

The idea of two mathematicians getting ahead of a serial killer by using their knowledge of math is a good one. Unfortunately, the math was yadda-yadda stuff and every thing else was a melange of clichés. experimental stuff, and incompetence. There is a surprise ending, but it is anticlimax, not climax. By then, you couldn't care less, since everything but the kitchen sink is thrown in as the movie careens around like a pinball in a pinball machine.It begins with a gratuitous scene about Ludwig Witgenstein. Ludwig Witgenstein was indeed a fearless fighter in World War I who did keep a notebook. But the idea that he would sit down unprotected under fire to write a thought in his notebook is absurd. Another gratuitous scene: The filming of a love scene matching a super attractive woman three quanta of sexy above the male lead doesn't work. Then he pours spaghetti-with sauce-on her is,....well, yuckie. Maybe it plays to some pasta perverts.Absolutely insane red herrings, more tangents, no tension as no thread is followed without endless distractions.....too bad. Could have been a winner.