The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

What is this movie supposed to be? A murder mystery? Probably not. Not too much attention is paid to the mystery and the solution is lame, almost thrown away. Existential? We do see a lot of the victim's nude body and her dead face. Creepy and unnecessary. Is the film meant to tell us about the adventures of a bright female writer uncovering secrets? Nope. The female lead character is kind of dumb (but beautiful, of course), and the "secrets" are not very compelling. The unraveling of these tepid secrets takes time and is confusing with too many flashbacks into different eras and places, all of which look the same. Thus, it is too hard to follow to allow viewer involvement in the plot.This movie reminded me of the soft-core porn movies shown on late night cable or satellite TV. This is different in that the performances are that of skilled professionals. Great sets! Great music! But the enterprise seemed to have the same purpose as the soft-core throwaways: an excuse to show woman's bodies and simulated sex.

I watched "Where the Truth Lies" on DVD - uncut, all sex included - and found it both fascinating and disappointing - frustrating, as if there were a missed opportunity somewhere. So I got the book from the library, thinking maybe there was some choice made in the translation from print to screen that skewed things.Turns out the source of my frustration, the thing that felt "wrong" was in the book, and Atom Egoyan stayed 99% true to the book.The film's problem is that it is a story told in the voice and from the point of view of the least interesting character - K. Connor. In both the movie and the book, the most vibrant, passionate, interesting point of view belongs to Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon). I'm not sure why the book's author chose to make the girl journalist the narrator of the whole complex tale, but it may have had something to do with the fact that Jerry Lewis is still alive and has many many lawyers.At any rate, in both the book and the movie - but especially in the movie - the complexity and shifting suspicions could have been made elegant if the protagonist had been Lanny. Lanny, forced into solving a mystery he does not want to solve, because some journalist named K. Connor is nosing around with a million-dollar book deal. And then he finds out that K. Connor is none other than ... well.It's a love story, stirred up by K. Connor but ultimately she is peripheral to it. Lanny's real love interest - as in, karmic, deep, bonded love - is Vince. Even with all the annoyance of K. Connor taking up way too much screen time, the relationship between Vince and Lanny is mesmerizing.Egoyan's choice to change the ending feels more human and true than the ending of the book, but clarifies K. Connor's real motives far too late to relieve the dissatisfaction.If only.Still, Bacon and Firth are pure pleasure.

This film asks you to imagine what it would have been like if Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis had broken up their comedy team, not because they couldn't stand each other anymore, but because one of them killed a girl. It's an intriguing idea. Unfortunately, this movie never lives up to that promise. It turns into a pointlessly convoluted and almost laughably conceived "thriller" where poor Alison Lohman is hung out to dry in a starring role she's not ready for.Vince Collins and Lanny Morris (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon) are a famous show biz duo of the 1950s. Vince is the class and Lanny the scoundrel and they're rich and famous, lighting up movie screens and night clubs all over America. After performing a 39 hour telethon for charity in Miami, they fly to New Jersey to open up a new night club. That's when a dead girl from Miami turns up in Vince and Lanny's New Jersey hotel suite. 15 years later in the early 1970s, a young journalist named Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) is looking to write a book about Collins and Morris. She's gotten a publisher to fork over a million dollars to get Vince to finally talk about their lives and careers and especially what happened to that dead girl. When Karen finds out that Lanny is writing his own book, she becomes even more determined to uncover the secret that Vince and Lanny have been protecting for so long.The good things about Where the Truth Lies are that it has a nice amount of nudity, including lots of Kevin Bacon's bare behind for the ladies and some of the gentlemen, one really fine sex scene and superb performances from Bacon and Colin Firth. They essentially have to create multiple versions of the same men. They not only have to portray Vince and Lanny at the height of their talent and fame as well as on the downside of their careers and lives, they also have to show us Vince and Lanny both as they really are and the personas they hide behind when facing the rest of the world. They make you want to see more of Vince and Lanny as big stars of the 50s and make you feel sorry for them as fading stars of the 70s.All of that, however, isn't nearly enough to overcome all the problems with this film. To start with, Alison Lohman does a poor job with her role. Karen O'Connor is a complex and demanding character that not only has to measure up to Vince and Lanny but has to carry a lot of the story all by herself. At this point in her career, Lohman is clearly not in the same acting league as Bacon and Firth. She gives Karen all the emotional depth of a teenage girl working behind a department story make-up counter. Lohman seems to have talent, but she has none of the skills needed for this sort of performance and becomes a void that drains all the energy out of the story.For its own part, this story is overly complex and badly structured. There are dueling narrators and multiple flashbacks, different versions of the same events and totally unnecessary subterfuge. The murder of the Miami girl is barely referenced in the first half of the movie and then completely dominates the second half, creating different tones and paces for the two halves. And then there's the secret of the dead Miami girl. Oy. I suppose it might have seemed like a clever twist when somebody first came up with it, either writer/director Atom Egoyan or Rupert Holmes who wrote the book upon which this movie is based. It should have only seemed clever for 5 seconds, though, because it gets dumber and dumber and dumber the more you think about it.Where the Truth Lies is skillfully directed and Bacon and Firth give appealing and layered performances, but the movie is fatally compromised by too many moments when you're watching it and thinking "You've got to be kidding me". This is one of those DVDs you see sitting on the shelf and you wonder why you haven't heard of it because there are some reasonably big stars in it. The reason why you haven't heard of this film and the others like it is that they're just plain bad. Instead of wasting money promoting it in theaters, these things are puked almost directly into video stores where they wait for some unsuspecting sucker to rent them. Don't be one of the suckers who rents Where the Truth Lies.

That was truly awful.There was so much wrong with this movie that I just don't know where to begin. The plot is totally predictable and as far away from being believable it can get. Watching Alison Lohman in this movie was painful - the way she looks and speaks, you just can't make yourself believe that anyone of the other characters should take her character seriously. I just kept wondering why Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon agreed to take part in this nightmare. And then again, why of why was Alison Lohman picked to play this role?!? As awful as she is, she shouldn't get the whole credit for ruining this effort. The whole story is something like an unhealthy mix of Miss Marple stories and a bit of drugs, alcohol and soft-porn action, full of clichés and easy answers.