Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Good concept, poorly executed.

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Exact rating: 8.25The pulse of this movie is subversive and menacing, and even though there are many, many great laughs, I think the classification of it as a comedy is wrong. It never feels like a comedy. In terms of tone, it is something like the pilot for Twin Peaks and a Mamet play and an Odets play, but with some strange off off off off Broadway claustrophobia and seventies nihilistic horror. It displays a collapsed and paranoid urban environment in which people are combative with words and isolated by them.I feel it should be essential viewing for any writer, as it contains four of the best-- if not the actual four best-- monologues I've ever heard in a movie. Arkin and Sutherland have amazing monologues that are only marginally upstaged by those given by Gould and Jacobi.I laughed many, many times (as did many people in the sold out screening I attended), but when it ended, the haunting and thoughtful core of the movie lingered more than did the comedy.A rich and allegorical piece that deserves serious study and accolades.(I saw a 35mm print of the movie at Film Forum, N.Y.)

Alan Arkin directs Jules Feiffer's wicked black comedy. It's so hilarious yet so cringe-inducing, it's impossible to categorize LITTLE MURDERS. Elliott Gould is a New York photographer so warped by apathy that it's shocking when agrees to marry free-spirited (and eternally hopeful) Marcia Rodd. Rodd attempts to get Gould to change with limited success. Her insane family is no help. Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson are her parents, taking every bleak bit of misery New York has to offer in stride. Feiffer's script (from his play) is so rich and so scathing, it makes Neil Simon's THE OUT-OF-TOWNERS look like a promo film for the NY board of tourism. Feiffer's New York is riddled with problems: brown-outs; snipers; obscene callers; muggers, etc. The acting is stellar, with Gould giving what is arguably his finest performance. Rodd, woefully underused in films, is every inch his equal. They have great chemistry. Gardenia & Wilson are hilarious. Donald Sutherland has a very funny cameo as a hippie/Reverend and Arkin himself appears as a hysterical police detective.

What do you do when the constant onslaught of muggings, defective public services, obscene phonecalls and general disenchantment of the city has crushed your once-promising career as a photographer to the point where you only take pictures of excrement - for which they still give you awards? What do you do when people beat you up just because they notice you, and across the city people are being murdered in their hundreds by unknown assailants with no apparent motive? Why are they doing it? And what, finally, do you do when the one woman you have found whose optimism remains undefeated by all this is shockingly and savagely murdered in your arms, at the very moment you hesitantly tell her that she's made you begin to feel again? This marvellous, blacker-than-soot satire solves all these puzzles with an answer that seems to have put off many viewers with its callous cynicism: why - buy a gun and start shooting people yourself! There's much more to this - the film suggests - than simply joining what you can't beat. More, indeed, than simply fighting back against the incoming bullets. The implication is that - alone among the city's miserable, oppressed citizens - the snipers who are picking off strangers in the streets are actually having fun. The rest are just targets.Brilliant, hysterical and shocking by turns, with spectacular performances all round.

Some movies are a journey you must commit to, no matter what. And Little Murders is this sort of film. Halfway through it, I was thinking, why am I watching this junk? But the quirky, engrossing performances by the uniformly skillful cast kept me in the story, as bizarre as it was. I wasn't sure I liked where the film was taking me, but I kept agreeing to keep watching, sometimes scene by scene. But as Elizabeth Wilson utters (or actually thinks) the film's final line, I finally "got it." It was a trip worth taking, and the destination made it worthwhile, even though it covered some pretty rough territory along the way.