Let's be realistic.

Disturbing yet enthralling

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I've just returned after seeing this movie and it has messed your dude up. This was my life for the two years I spent with my Milena. The parallels are uncanny. I am kind of nerdy just like Garfunkel...same pathetic physique...but like Garfunkel I have a certain magnetism. Garfunkel's not exactly a wimp...there's some steel in his gaze. My Milena was just as magnetic and beautiful as Theresa Russell...really. My Milena also lived in a sordid, messy, sexy aerie with a big bed, overfull ashtrays, half-read books everywhere. The alcohol? Check. The infidelity? Check. The suicide attempts? Check. The much older other man? Check. The sleazy, disgusting party friends? Check. The late-night drunk calls that may or may not have been suicide attempts? Check. The intense sex that regularly turned into something twisted? Check. Just like Garfunkel I was hooked...just like Garfunkel I had a "together" life...my God, I even study psychoanalysis...and just like Garfunkel there was more than a hint of bad faith in the togetherness I opposed to my Milena's sloppiness. Like Garfunkel, the idea that Milena had other lovers made me crazy...like Theresa Russell, my Milena needed secrets...lies...she couldn't breathe without her lies and secrets.The scene where she sets Garfunkel up with her fake suicide attempt only to loose the full force of her hysterical cruelty on him...check...down to the blows and the broken bottles...and it marked the moment our love died, even if things dribbled on for a while after that. Anyway...you get the picture. You know a movie is good when it shows you things about YOUR OWN life that you hadn't noticed before. That's the secret of a great movie: you feel like it's talking to you and to you alone. I have a feeling I'm not the only person who walked out of the cinema feeling like he had just seen his own life on the screen. Almost everything is perfect. This film is even more disturbing than DON'T LOOK NOW. That is saying a lot. The one wrong note for me was Harvey Keitel. I liked the contrast of his healthy virility with Garfunkel's nerdiness...but Keitel got something wrong. Not sure what...it was certainly a tricky role, and he wasn't exactly bad, but something was wrong.

His movie rates high in production value and acting and has an innovative approach to an old story… The film is basically a character study… Alex (Art Garfunkel) is a depressingly dark and shadowy American psychoanalyst living in Vienna… Theresa Russell plays Milena, a resonant, carefree American girl… They meet by chance at a party and are thrown into a roller-coaster ride of an erotic relationship… He wants to smash her free spirit because he can't understand it, but she won't let him… The result is a near-fatal break-up… Roeg comes close to the story from the middle (obeying Jean-Luc Godard's authoritative saying, a film "must have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order." We quickly move to the different parts of Alex and Milena's relationship, moving through time as if it were Jell-O. The editing is intricate, but not confusing… As we change location back and forth, we begin to see more clearly how these two unlikely lovers ever got together… The motion picture is filled with exceptional images, and Theresa Russell is outstanding

Nicolas Roeg anatomises a love affair, and then re-arranges the pieces to create an affective display. The film is visceral, poetic, dizzying and provocative, moving, sexy and repulsive by turns. It features brilliant performances from all of the cast, most notably Russell - few actresses can achieve the kind of freewheeling and real sensuality that she achieves so seemingly effortlessly here.Set mostly in Vienna, the film takes the psychologists need to control and coral the instincts and life force of a living human woman to be ultimately murderous. One is never quite sure whether Harvey Keitel's detective is a manifestation of guilt and the super-ego or a real on-the-trail policeman; in the end it doesn't matter, as the man in question is forced to face his own reality as a life-denying entity.The ending, as with Performance, shows a fragile human consciousness being driven off to their doom in a car which appears to be the manifestation of a post-modern world in which they are desperately lost.

British drama from director Nicolas Roeg, an enigmatic filmmaker who prides himself on turning out jigsaw-puzzle movies intended for specialty audiences. Those who aren't especially impressed with Roeg's technique may say that his films are constructed in the editing process, not before or during the film's production, and that this leaves his pictures feeling empty or choppy (but always artistically choppy!). The plot of "Bad Timing" has something to do with flirtatious, troubled Theresa Russell and her relationship with an odd young psychiatrist. Ugly to look at, aloof and tiresome; the film did get some sterling notices in 1980, but most curious viewers will be satisfied after an hour. *1/2 from ****