1. JoeC.

   10

   Great movie. Works as a thriller, romance and drama. Great performances by Fiennes and Weisz and Meirelles is proving himself as a master of filmmaking!… Expand

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2. DavidH.

   5

   Le Carre's most disappointing book turned into a disappointing film. Odd collection of villains, some nice scenery, and a couple of pretty actors brooding.… Expand

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3. Riren

   3

   International pharmaceutical companies have been exploiting poor Africans in need of medicine for decades in order to test their drugs, regardless of their potentially crippling or lethal side effects. If the preceding sentence interested you, read a book about it. Don't see this movie. It's neither informative, nor an actually good film. The first half hour is a nearly incomprehensible exercise in flashbacks and flash forwards, setting up a disconnected chronology to excuse all the later scenes in the film from having to occur along a realistic timeline. It works with the naivety of an action movie, but reaches insultingly for the depths of a conspiracy movie, and comes away with the satisfaction of neither. It decomposes into sentimental trash by the end, with its great cast’s highly sympathetic acting jobs being thoroughly abused by sloppy editing and very poor direction. The use of manic cinematography decreases your attention span, doing no service to the plot’s slow burn – and despite it being slow, relationships between nearly all of the characters are left horribly confusing. After you realize you spent the first forty minutes of this movie just to get back to the beginning of the plot, and still have another hour and a half to go, you'll realize the half-baked melodramatic romance (which sees the main characters go from fighting at a lecture to bouncing in bed within five minutes of screen time) and bitter pseudo-realism wasn't worth the price of the ticket or DVD. Worst of all, this movie about the abuse of Africa's sick is about pretty people - the drama is foreigners running from terror, or children in peril, or the excess of the rich, with little more than ten seconds of screen time for any character who is actually stricken with T.B. or HIV. The lack of screen time for the actual suffering in the subject matter is the worst fault of a film that is pretty much exploiting that atrocity to give guilty-feeling non-Africans some catharsis. In the end, you can blame all the evils of the world on corporations and bureaucracy, but you can't blame them for this being a bad movie.… Expand

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