hyped garbage

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I found this film was more about love than drugs and depression. She say's 'why did she think falling in love would make things better' etc etc. When someone dies and you know you could have stopped or hindered them except that you would have done the same in their circumstances 'it hurts' it's the nature of love to understand yet still grieve. The film has old people in it, any one else notice that? He loves her even though she cheated on him, he can't escape because he loves her, yet his love for her rips him to shreds, all he wants is to be with her, to have what he thought they always had. the guy who overdoses is suffering the same pain, he wants what they had always had before she died, no matter how awful it was, at least they had something. Old and young, we just want what we had before it turned sour. Nothing to do with drugs or adultery just people wanting what they perceived as good. Well done, I loved the film.

Although I understand what the writer/director is trying to do with this debut, I just felt massively underwhelmed by the project. It also feels too lengthy and dragged out. If the stories were told a little faster and with some stronger actors, I'm sure I would have been pulled into their dark, stormy worlds.A good start grabbed me attention wise and I wanted to know where the characters were going but there is only so many long shots of an every-day scenario you can take before it becomes something akin to looking at a photograph intently for 10 minutes when you've seen the same photo 5-times before.The old couple were particularly poignant but the other characters didn't capture the mindset excessively or vividly. An interesting debut for someone who must have had good backing and I think it could have been snappier and shorter and still retained its gritty teeth.Direction can, indeed, make a film as much as good acting can overhaul dodgy directing. However, 'Better Things' doesn't live up its positive title. I understand the irony/play on that title but even in the depths of reality and creeping inside the corpse of drug abuse, I wanted a lot, lot more to happen and a lot more to get me thinking about.

The photographer and filmmaker Duwne Hopkins' Better things is rather ironically titled: its people are hardly moving toward improvement in their bleak lives, though they might like to. They live in a marginal community in the English Cotswolds that seems to be dominated by adolescents and old people. All of them are either depressed, or addicted to drugs, or just old, run down, idle, or lost. Most are desperately hoping for love, but unable to find it. Hopkins, who has made some celebrated short films on related topics, is a native of the area and is careful to use local people, including former drug addicts. Faces seem harshly real, light is sculpted, landscape panoramas are dark and painterly.The shock here is that we're in the lovely English countryside, but it's full of urban problems: poverty, unemployment, drug addiction. There is no Hollywood glamor or Trainspotting wild style about these young addicts. The eye is poetic but the stories are sociological realism.A young woman named Tess (Emma Cooper) dies of an overdose, and those who remain don't seem better off, with a few exceptions: an estranged old couple gradually becomes reconciled, a girl overcomes her fear of leaving her room, and the boyfriend screws up the courage to visit the dead girl's mother.That boyfriend, Rob (Liam McIlfatrick), as well as David (Che Corr) and Jon (Freddie Cunliffe) all did heroin with Tess, although David, due to the influence of girlfriend Sarah (Tara Ballard), is half-heartedly trying to stop. Rob is struggling, not least with his inability to attend Tess's funeral because of his complicity in her death. Jon's grandfather (Frank Bench) is released from the hospital and when he returns home--in some of the bleakest scenes of marital shutdown ever filmed--avoids his poor old wife (Betty Bench). His anger is never explained, but he does eventually let it go. Tess's friend Gail (Rachel McIntyre) missed the funeral because she has become phobic about leaving her room. Her grandmother (Patricia Loveland) has a hard time getting her to get up in the morning. She is taking a new medication, a therapist or social worker makes a home visit, and she improves after a look at the stormy fields and trees outside with her failing "nan." The plot lines include 18 characters. As one reviewer has noted, the three young male leads are hard to tell apart; and so are some of the names. The meandering sequences tend to seem random, even when artificially linked by sound or image.Despite the integrity, something is missing--perhaps just stylistic restraint. Blue-tinted, carefully planned images of inertia are jarred awake by abrupt shock editing in which cross-cutting of similar moments and shifts from silence to noise are used a little too freely. I began to think the film would have worked better if the main stories had been followed through in separate sections instead of shuffled together--if, in short, Hopkins had worked in a simpler documentary style, let characters and scenes play out, and made space for more motivation and movement than simply waiting to score or racing at breakneck speed on a country road. The stylistically overwrought manner doesn't allow sequences and characters to breathe and detracts from the authenticity of the content, which, however mired in stasis, seems richly textured. There is a talent here that is at war with itself.Shown in March 2009 as part of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, New York.

...Bruno Dumont. I've read a lot of reviews lauding this supposedly great example of British art-house cinema. Even Sight and Sound made it film of the month. But the facts are simple, everything about it says the filmmaker is in thrall to the work of Bruno Dumont, particularly La Vie de Jesus and L'Humanite. And why not, they are magnificent films.Unfortunately it only goes to highlight the miserable state of British art-house and British film-making in general that this is held up as a fine example of it when all it does is rip off the style and downbeat content of Dumont's great works. For the unforgiving Northern France landscape of Dumont substitute the Cotswolds and you've got it.In fact its worth pointing out that the similarities in the prolonged static widescreen shots and the dull grey cinematography, so perfectly mimic L'Humanite especially that one would almost believe the filmmaker had had the audacity to give the colourist a copy of that film and then have him match the shots one by one.But no filmmaker could be that cynical or unoriginal. Could they? 2 stars for the perfectly copied photography.