Perfect cast and a good story

Am I Missing Something?

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

This film is a little thin in many respects. It is beautifully shot, and has some potentially interesting characters, but the remained quite flat. I think that, on occasion, were given a clue as to what was driving the lives of the characters. In particular, we did get to see some internal struggle developing after Shandurai (Thandie Newton) learns her husband is not lost and is returning to her life... well after she has recovered from his loss. I had not seen Thandie Newton before, but I will be looking the rental shelves to see if I can find some of her other work. While it is politically incorrect to judge a book by its cover, I must say that she has just rocketed past a long list of my personal picks for the most beautiful woman on the planet.Despite any flaws the critiques may choose to expose, I liked this film very much and am absolutely over the moon with Ms. Newton.

Very few times do I see movies that leave me with no emotion other than boredom. This is one of those few movies. I don't recall seeing any of Berdolucci's earlier work, but he possesses a knack for assembling images. He's definitely a fine visual artist, and I felt some of the sets were beautiful, as well as the music. Unfortunately, the script might as well have been a series of blank pages. I'm sure many will praise the film because of its lack of dialogue, and how artful that is since so many modern films depend too much on dialogue. Well, that may be true, but no dialogue alone doesn't make a movie work. "In the Bedroom" contained long scenes with no dialogue, but the silent images helped tell the story, and the brilliant facial expressions by both Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek gave the audience great insight into how they were feeling. I'm not bashing the actors in this movie, and Thandie Newton and David Thewlis are both genuinely talented, but they're not given much to work with. The story contains very little conflict. At times the love affair between Newton and Thewlis seems to be forgotten, and the whole affair itself contains no passion. You know a movie's awful when it has NO effect on you. It didn't make me angry, it didn't annoy me, it didn't repulse me, it did nothing! And even at 90 minutes, it felt like a miniseries! My score: 2 (out of 10)

I fail to understand where all these 8, 9 & 10 votes come from... the film is more concerned with cinematography than telling a story. OK it was beautifully done, but there was nothing in the story that couldn't have been told in half the time - and then used the other half to fill us in on the background and the results (did he pay for it?, did she go back to him?).As it stands, the most memorable thing about the film is the introductory sequence featuring that wonderful music, from-the-bones singing and later on the wonderful facial contortions from John C. Ojwang.5/10

A lot of reviews of BESIEGED said Bernardo Bertolucci was returning to LAST TANGO IN PARIS territory. That may very well be true, but there's one distinction about TANGO which Bertolucci should have remembered; in TANGO, it was a story between two fully realized characters(we may remember the movie for Brando, for better or worse, but Maria Schneider was every bit his equal), and so it resonates long afterwards. In this movie, on the other hand, we get every sense of Thandie Newton, through her acting(as this and previous works such as BELOVED prove, she's one of the most expressive actors out there), and through the gorgeous use of imagery and music, especially in the Africa scenes(if it wasn't for the fact that there's a film coming out next year with that name, this might be called I DREAMED OF AFRICA). Even though very little dialogue is used, we get a history and arc to her, so we care what happens to her.But a love story, which this purports to be, is best when it's two equals. What of David Thewlis here? Well, we get a sense of his piano playing, which changes the longer Newton stays around(the scene where he incorporates African type rhythms into his music is quite good). And certainly his actions speak for themselves(he's clearly trying to free her husband). But still, he remains closed off from us; not as an enigma, but as in not expressive. It doesn't help that Thewlis is probably more suited to a role where he has more dialogue(he can be expressive, as he showed in NAKED), and seems lost here. But we never really get a sense of him, so when the two finally come together, it doesn't move us the way it should.Still, the other half of the film, Newton's half, does work enough for me to recommend the film. And while I am a fan of good dialogue, it didn't bother me how little there was here.