Fresh and Exciting

As Good As It Gets

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This was an amazing find for me and my girlfriend. We were watching late night television and were enthralled by this comic gem from the great director Philip Kaufman starring the young Jon Voight before he did "Midnight Cowboy", etc. This film was made before the television series "Batman", etc. and has some brilliant comic book conceits that have been copied in the Batman films, etc. After Frank is brought back to life by the good doctor, there's a wonderful scene which could have been the inspiration for Geoffrey Rush's character in "The King's Speech". The film stars a who's who from Chicago's Second City and is full of humor and energy. The acting and the directing are spot on for a little independent film and it foreshadowed Kaufman's talents for his later films like "the Right Stuff" and, in some ways, "The Unbearable lightness of Being". Hope it plays again soon. Does anyone know how to get a hold of a DVD of this film? We would love to get a copy.

i LOVE this movie. I LOVE it! i saw it in the 1980s, which contradicts other reviewers info here. but i saw it, not in the movie theaters and not on television, but in film school. the school of visual arts had the foresight at that time, to show and old film, at that time, to a bunch of lunatic film students and everyone cheered and went nuts. now, this film isn't for everyone. and i don't think i'm better or worse than anyone else who's seen this. but we'd been trained to recognize "camp" and "campy" production values for their own sake. this's a spirited romp. with an ultimately downbeat message. voight is great. monique van vooren is wonderful (always wonderful to see an underrated actress used so well) and the oddball cameos are... odd. the improvised dialog (hell, improvised shooting in chi-town) make this a must-see for fans of casavettes. think "shadows", comically unhinged. yeah, it's amateurish at times. yeah, those holes show right through. but watch this either in your 'teens or twenties, or if you can't do that, stoned might help. or if you have a non-uptight sense of the daring and outlandish, this should work for you. if you're looking for seamless, state of the art, same-ness by today's eyeball knockout special effects standards, don't even bother. you just won't get it and end up being angry for your wasted time. otherwise, check it out!

I loved the cartoonish aspect of the movie. Jon Voight was excellent and showed great comic flair. The movie Mystery Men reminds me of FF. I saw it as a kid and thought that it was coolest movie I had ever seen, but that was over 30 years ago. I would love to see it again.

I first saw this film when I was 11 years old (on the KTLA 'Movies Til Dawn' at 2:00 am), and I didn't realize the impact it had on me until I saw it again a few months ago (17 years later). I found two scenes between Frank and False Frank had really affected me, SPOILER WARNING: One was when Frank, after he has fallen from grace, tries to fly and falls to his destruction on the pavement below and fades away. It affected me that the 'hero' of the film should die that way, the hero believing in his own abilities and dying because of his own failings. Second, when the False Frank is crying in the boat at the end of the film. I was again bothered by the image of the new 'hero' losing emotional control like that. Possibly these images don't mean anything to the vast majority of people who saw the film, but they had a profound effect on me. I am surprised at how few people have voted/commented on this film. I feel it is an undiscovered gem of film-making, waiting for a re-appraisal.