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Cassandra's Dream

EMAILPRINTThe Weinstein Company

Cassandra's Dream reviews
49
7.6 User Score:

Mixed or average reviews

Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

Based on 18 votes
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Movie Info

Genre(s): Crime  |  Drama

Written by: Woody Allen

Directed by: Woody Allen

Release Date:
Theatrical: January 18, 2008
DVD: May 27, 2008

Running Time: 108 minutes, Color

Origin: USA / UK

Summary

RATING: Not Rated

Starring Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, Tom Wilkinson, Sally Hawkins, and Hayley Atwell

Set in contemporary London, Cassandra's Dream is a powerful and thrilling story about two brothers who are desperate to better their troubled lives. One is a chronic gambler in debt over his head, and the other is a young man in love with a beautiful woman he has recently met. Their lives gradually become entangled in a sinister situation with intense and unfortunate results. (Weinstein Company)

What The Critics Said

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

88

New York Post Kyle Smith

It's a pulp story pinned to the screen with an ice pick of conscience in a manner that would have pleased Allen's idol, Ingmar Bergman.

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75

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Allen's latest, Cassandra's Dream, is one of his debonair ''small'' entertainments, the closest that he has come to doing a tidy, no-frills, down-and-dirty genre thriller.

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75

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

In thematic terms, Cassandra's Dream could be looked at as a rebuttal to "Crimes and Misdemeanors."

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75

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

The movie is actually a softer treatment of the similar sibling anguish in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead." Allen isn't enough of a great dark artist to pull off a full-scale tragedy the way Lumet does.

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70

Time Richard Schickel

It is a talkative film, rather earnest in its tonalities, not at all a deft, witty or well-paced. On the other hand, it is, for Allen, a comparatively rare excursion into lower-class life.

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70

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

Woody Allen’s latest excursion to the dark side of human nature, is good enough that you may wonder why he doesn’t just stop making comedies once and for all.

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70

The New Yorker David Denby

Ewan McGregor’s bright-eyed Ian, following in the footsteps of characters in Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and “Match Point,” is a study in guilt-free violence. But Colin Farrell’s Terry is something new. Terry is a decent guy with many weaknesses, and, after the crime is committed, Farrell gives him a piteous self-loathing that is very touching.

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67

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

This 38th Allen film (and third in a row to be set in London) is a drama about two brothers that's so heavy in tone it seems inspired by Greek tragedy and the grimmest '40s film noir.

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67

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's not Allen's weakest work, not by far. But its impact is shockingly superficial.

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67

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

What we get are themes and variations on previous good work, to lessening effect.

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63

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Allen, who stays behind the camera, brings too little wit and too much contrivance to material that quickly dissolves into warmed-over Dostoevski.

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58

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Like so many late-period Allens, it leaves behind the feeling that he's made this movie before, but better.

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50

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The identical premise is used in Sidney Lumet's "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead," which is like a master class in how Allen goes wrong.

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50

Village Voice Scott Foundas

Feels like one of Allen's laziest pieces of writing and direction, leaden with heavy metaphor and characters who rarely make it beyond the archetype--marionettes in a miserablist puppet theater.

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50

Variety Derek Elley

Like a tragic overture played at the wrong tempo and slightly off-key, Woody Allen's London-set Cassandra's Dream sends out more mixed signals than an inebriated telegraphist.

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50

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This is a lame psychological thriller with an obvious story trajectory. It's a wannabe film noir with no atmosphere whatsoever.

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50

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

Allen is obsessed with the notion of getting away with murder, mulling over which personalities can shoulder the psychological burden of killing without remorse, while others crumble under the pressure. The problem is, you don’t feel the human sweat and strain in Cassandra’s Dream, despite game work from Farrell and McGregor.

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50

Los Angeles Times Kevin Crust

An uninspired if perfectly watchable drama.

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50

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

A psychological thriller in serious need of both psychology and thrills, Cassandra's Dream is a wan, exceedingly minor drama by Woody Allen, who has started to recycle himself in London the way he had long been recycling his New York City pictures.

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50

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The Coen brothers might have pulled this off, but it's out of Allen's faltering reach.

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50

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

There's not a believable character, nor line of convincing dialogue to be found.

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42

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Allen's latest, his 42nd effort as a director, is the work of an artist devoid of ideas and energy. Perfunctorily staged and lazily written, it comes to life in only the briefest of spurts, usually when the ever-reliable Tom Wilkinson is on-screen.

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40

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

After making his best and smoothest drama (Match Point) in England, Woody Allen returns there for one of his most clueless and awkward, outfitted with a standard-issue Philip Glass score.

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40

Slate Dana Stevens

Cassandra's Dream is not unredeemably bad. MacGregor and Farrell hack away at their implausible dialogue with admirable intensity (though when Terry starts to descend into mental illness, Farrell touches his limits as an actor).

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40

The Hollywood Reporter Ray Bennett

As writer, Allen offers lazy plotting, poor characterization, dull scenes and flat dialogue.

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38

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The thrills are few and the expository dialogue tediously overwhelming in this preachy cautionary tale about getting too big for one's britches.

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38

USA Today Claudia Puig

Farrell is quite good, though it's hard to buy the Scottish McGregor and the Irish Farrell as brothers. But mostly, the film feels rudderless, almost as if it's been directed on autopilot.

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30

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Instead of offering a perspective that, at the very least, laments a world where the flow of money hurts otherwise good people, Allen simply pushes the movie into an uncertain sinkhole between morality play and black comedy.

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30

Austin Chronicle Josh Rosenblatt

At this point, I guess we should just applaud Allen for his work ethic. Even at the ripe, old age of 72, he’s still making movies at the rate of one a year, come rain or come shine. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t make good movies at the rate of one a year. In fact, by my count, he hasn’t made a good movie for almost a decade (1999’s "Sweet & Lowdown").

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30

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.

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25

Premiere Eric Alt

Takes a long time to say nothing new, which is a shame because it wastes fine performances across the board (it's a nice reminder that Farrell, can, in fact, act), and, well, a really effective score by Philip Glass.

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What Our Users Said

The average user rating for this movie is 7.6 (out of 10) based on 18 User Votes

Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Craig G. gave it a1:
Quite possibly one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. However I was so morbidly fascinated that I watched it all the way through on DVD to see how bad it could get. Poor script, poorly delivered by people who should have known better. The dramatic moments were quite funny. It looked like a TV soap opera gone wrong. And when lines were fluffed, why didnt the director say Cut and do it again? Redeeming features are few but some of the settings were quite pretty and the old Jaguar cars were nice too but I still couldnt see their purpose _ a bit of window dressing I suppose. And where did the boys' parents go after the dastardly deed was done? Not a word from them as the film grinds to a close. In short contrived and awful. Cassandra's dream should be Woody's nightmare.

Tom M. gave it an8:
Similar to Bob Dylan in music anything Woody Allen creates is a must, no matter what the scribes or experts say. And I'm sure "Cassandra's Dream" will get its share of thumbs-down reviews from non-Woody afficionados. I liked it. The storyline was dark, strangely human, and fun. The acting was good, especially Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell as the two brothers. I had some trouble, initially, with the British accents, but even that seemed to dissipate as the movie continued.

Jay H. gave it an8:
Excellent suspense thriller, brilliantly directed and written by Woody Allen. The score is outstanding, as is the cinematography. Convincingly told and very well acted by everyone. It's held my interest throughout. Superb.

Michael E. gave it a6:
Pretty ordinary stuff, but Woody is a good enough writer and director to pull it off. At any rate it isn't as cold and familiar as "Match Point."

Chad S. gave it a7:
"Cassandra's Dream" may be set in England, but some of its characters, you could argue, have a New York-state-of-mind. Just like people who say they were born into the wrong family; Ian(Ewan McGregor) and Angela(Hayley Atwell) strike me as sophisticates who somehow ended up in a Mike Leigh film. Even though Ian and Angela belong to the same working class as Terry(Colin Farrell) and Kate(Sally Hawkins), they're just conspicuously better looking, and more refined than Ian's brother and girlfriend. Like many New Yorkers, the handsome couple are planning a move to California. Even though "Cassandra's Dream" seems to mark a departure from this filmmaker's fascination with the middle-upper class, he's far from being a humane filmmaker like Leigh, or Ken Loach. Although Ian is comparatively amoral when sized-up against his tortured brother, he one-ups Terry when push comes to shove, because the favorite son has so much more at stake. Ian, to my utter disbelief, ends up being more altruistic than Terry. Ian's actions goes against the grain of the film's rhetoric, which convinces us that Terry needs to be dealt with by any means necessary. Because rhetoric in the filmic world differs from its real-life counterpart. Since nobody can get hurt from a vicarious thrill, we engage our loyalties with people from the wrong side of the law, and root for their clean getaway. Ian & Terry are no different than, say, Bonnie & Clyde, but with a difference. The brothers, unlike the fugitive lovers from the 1967 Arthur Penn film, have a caste system in place. They're not treated as equals. "Cassandra's Dream", inadvertently, says a lot about this filmmaker, whom we've always suspected was filled with contempt for the proletariat. Ian's redemption at the end of "Cassandra's Dream" is proof of an inherent Manhattan haughtiness that puts a damper, but doesn't quite cancel out the film's many strengths. But make no mistake, there is a class-warfare subtext at play here.

Mark B. gave it an8:
Except for an early scene that quotes a famous bit in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (and maybe indicates that the two brothers in the scene, who are soon to commit an inextricable crime would have been better off if Bruce the Shark had gobbled them up) Woody Allen's latest film is almost totally devoid of humor. (Some might say that's ok, so were his most recent comedies.) The staging and shooting of several long sequences in this movie are so static that one occasionally wishes that the brothers' weapon of choice had been not a zip gun but a claw hammer, the better to remove the nails affixing the camera to the ground. And the surprise ending is far too abrupt to fully carry the punch Woody intended to deliver. Nevertheless, this is Allen's best, most accomplished and entertaining film since Crimes and Misdemeanors over a decade ago. (Note, of course, that neither film will exactly rival The Sound of Music as a blues-chaser, but who said that happy and enjoyable were always synonymous?) Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell , both playing wonderfully against type, are cast as brothers tempted to carry out a hit that would solve various financial needs and wants; it's not surprising that in classic tradition the assignment's completion and aftermath don't go as simply and smoothly as planned, but the originality of this movie arises from the fact that it would be the perfect crime if someone's conscience didn't so relentlessly get in the way. Allen shows us which brother has a sense of ethics and which is just a wee bit, um, challenged in that area early on: Ian (McGregor) dumps his girlfriend for a woman he literally meets on the road, while Terry (Farrell) is loyal to his spouse. (But then, since she's the sweetest woman in the world--if occasionally a little clueless--and she's played by the astonishingly adorable Sally Hawkins, who here pleasantly resembles mid-1980s Rosanna Arquette, why WOULDN'T he be? Love that overbite!) It's instructive to observe that coldblooded Ian endlessly aspires to upward mobility while the compulsive Terry is a working-class joe; Allen knows that the biggest sociopaths often aren't serial killers but CEOs and that it's often not the Norman Bateses or even Hannibal Lecters you have to look out for but the Gordon Gekkos...or worse, Gekko wannabes. Terrific byplay between the brothers and an almost comically overwrought score by Phillip Glass (who also did the honors for 2006's Notes on a Scandal with equally smashing results) give Cassandra's Dream a higher rewatchability factor than Allen's earlier exercise in Britpop bloodshed, Match Point. Despite some predictable musings about greed, fate and The Meaning Of It All, Cassandra's Dream plays like a really, really good extended episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents...and how many movies, by Allen or anybody else, can make THAT estimable claim?

Jensen D. gave it a10:
This is definitely the best movie that I have seen in some time. The middle class setting is much more realistic than most of Woody Allen's settings, and the acting is first rate. The film is a morality tale, and its themes stayed with me long after the closing credits. In brief:: one of Woody's best!

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