To me, this movie is perfection.

One of the best films i have seen

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

To say that this film gets off to a slow start is an understatement. At least at the beginning, it's about as exciting as a trip to the grocery store.Weakness # 1: There are these long pauses that should have been edited down to a more normal transition between scenes. Either the director doesn't know how to edit, or he thought there was something artistic about the pauses. If the latter is true...he doesn't get it. This film could probably be shortened by a good 20 minutes without missing any of the action.Weakness # 2: Cris Lankenau. He's an actor? Someone thought he could carry the lead role in a film? No. Just no.Weakness # 3: Scintillating dialog like, "How's your milkshake", which then leads to a couple of minutes of follow-up dialog.Weakness # 4: The ending...well, it does end (thank god!). But it's more like they ran out of disc space and just stopped.Weakness # 5: I have become quite enamored with the acting and screen presence of Raul Castillo. This film did NOTHING to advance his career. His part is close to being irrelevant. If you want to see Castillo in a really good film, try "Amexicano".I can honestly say that this is the WORST film I have ever seen.

The trailer for Cold Weather got me really, really excited. I was hoping for a cool, different mystery film. However, when I got to watching it, I found myself... wanting. Cold Weather had a lot of potential, but it's lost in a quagmire of an uninteresting mystery, unlikable characters, dreary cinematography and a badly constructed script. I was hoping for this kid to be some sort of cool Sherlock Holmes-type, but he came off (to me at least) as a loser. Why should we be interested in this guy if he has nothing to offer us but mumbles and misery? It's almost as if he wants to be a detective, but... isn't. The film kinda picks up near the end with the car sequence, but it's far too late into the film and not long enough. And that... ENDING... ARGH!Somebody on here keeps saying that the film isn't about the mystery. But if it's not about the mystery, and the characters are just a bunch of mopes, why should we watch?An Utter Waste of Time. Skip it. I recommend in place of this movie the films BRICK and ZERO EFFECT.

Be prepared to exert a LOT of patience if you're going to make it through this film.For the first 45 minutes, I really did wonder why on earth I was watching it. A brother, sister, the brother's ex-girlfriend and his best friend sit around various locations not talking or doing anything. Seriously. I understand that a film need not be packed with action in order to be engaging, but the number one rule of character studies is that the characters must be interesting for the film to be. Not so here.And the characters never really do become interesting, but the film does, after a mystery involving the ex-girlfriend's disappearance begins to unravel. The final twenty minutes or so, devoted exclusively to the brother and sister, and especially the film's final scene, make the viewer realize that the whole movie has really been about the brother and sister all along, and only makes one wish that it had delivered more sooner.In general this is a film I would recommend, but with the qualification that its engaging second half doesn't completely make up for the tediousness of its first.Grade: B

I won't address the story of Cold Weather in detail, because I think the less you know of it, the better. But if you do need story details in advance, I'm sure they're easily found in the movie synopsis or other reviews.  I'd just like to cover a few points about why I liked it. First of all, it's pretty awesome how Cold Weather mixes the everyday, mostly uneventful, almost boring lives of their characters with surprising levels of mystery and tension. It's not often the word "realistic" fits a film as aptly as it does this movie. Second, I thought it ended much too quickly and abruptly, which is actually a partial compliment. For one, I wasn't ready for it to be over, and it ended in an unexpected and non-formulaic way. Third, this was simply one of the freshest movie experiences I've had this  year, and I expect that it will be even better upon subsequent viewings. The closest thing I can think of to compare it to is Winter's Bone. Not because the stories are similar, but because they center around realistic, un-stylized characters that make small, personal events seem more urgent and engrossing than the world-ending, massively bombastic plots of some much bigger films. With that said, I definitely think the audience for Cold Weather is more narrow than broad. It's by no means a perfect movie. The plot relies on coincidence after coincidence, and that may be hard for some to swallow. It's also a slow-burner throughout, and that may bore some people. Slow-paced doesn't necessarily mean boring or bad in my opinion, though, so I don't hesitate in giving Cold Weather my approval.