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83If you might wish the film got deeper under the skin of the characters, you also feel grateful for the fact that you'll never get closer to them than watching it.
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75Money, madness, incest and murder! Just the recipe for a twisted mesmerizer of a movie, if it doesn't creep you out.
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75The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.
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75Part of the film's failure to arouse real horror is the languid direction; not enough seems to be at stake emotionally.
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75It's still primarily a showcase and offbeat star vehicle for Moore. It's a bravura role and she brings it off with a chilling malevolence and a strange, disjointed vulnerability that almost, but not quite, makes her sympathetic.
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U.S. viewers may be put off by its tangled sexual motifs and find its implied social critique a little close to the bone. But even Stateside, Julianne Moore, in her most challenging role in years, will win plaudits and attract mature audiences to a thoroughly absorbing and polished piece of work.
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70Howard A. Rodman's script has a lot of juice, and the rhythms are so pregnant that the air vibrates with something, even if you're not sure what.
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70Julianne Moore proves game for anything in this pitch-black true-crime reconstruction.
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67The director, Tom Kalin, stages acid duels, but he should have provided more psychological structure. Though Moore, a great actress, turns fury into verbal music, we're never quite sure what's driving her.
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67Savage Grace should have the force of Greek tragedy, but Kalin's chamber drama feels curiously stifling and flat, and Moore's volatile turn isn't enough to quicken its pulse.
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63Living these lives, for these people, must have been sad and tedious, and so, inevitably, is their story, and it must be said, the film about it.
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63A chilly inquest into very bad behavior, Savage Grace is presented to us like an entrée at a five-star French restaurant. It's decadence under glass.
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It's tough to think of another film in which sex between a mother and her son is not necessarily the worst thing that happens.
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50Savage Grace comes up bland and seems to go nowhere in particular.
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50Has everything one could ask of a true-crime expose.
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50Savage Grace is a thoroughly disturbing story, told in a detached style rendering the overall experience an unsettling blend of lurid and vacuous.
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50Rarely has appalling, reckless behavior been so soporific as in Savage Grace.
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50Scripter Howard A. Rodman's treatment of an enthralling book is more a series of vignettes rather than a fully connected work, and helmer Tom Kalin seems unable to decide how much Sirkian melodrama to introduce into the heady mix. Gone are the reasons to be fascinated with these people, merely replaced with maddeningly over-arch dialogue and struggles with characterization.
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50The film includes graphic omnisexual and incestuous couplings and has an air of free-floating dread but, especially given its subject matter, it's oddly vacuous – it rarely takes hold emotionally even when its people hit bottom with a resounding thud.
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40"Grace" may be based on a true story, but barely a moment in it feels real.
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40To be sure, it's a very pretty, well acted production; however, that doesn't make up for the fact that I hated every minute of it.
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40Savage Grace is simply hysterical: a film as harsh, brittle and unbalanced as its characters.
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40You can almost smell the desperation in the twisted psychosexuality of Savage Grace.
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40Proust might have known what to do with the Baekelands, but Mr. Kalin and Mr. Rodman don't make much more of them than the mess they apparently already were.
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38For all its outré set pieces it never rises above the level of pretentious trash.
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A tawdry nighttime soap that marvels without insight at its characters' despicable behavior: It squanders a major performance by Moore.
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30What Kalin fails to provide in the slightest degree is energy. The movie just sloshes along in a heavy, slightly overdone way.
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25An unbroken flow of sad or nasty incidents.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 3 out of 5
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Mixed: 0 out of 5
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Negative: 2 out of 5
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MichaelH6
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JayH6