If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Don't be deceived by the excessive praise afforded to this film, as it actually features little substance. Many of the vignettes are just a scene in length and none are particularly outstanding. The sort of hammy, over-the-top acting seen throughout may be excusable in a feature length film where other content exists to pad it out but instead the viewer is stuck suffering through heavy over-performance after heavy over-performance. The writing varies immensely, with some of the most cliché content seeming a somewhat deliberate attempt to mock everyday, mundane conversation. That's not to say that the film isn't without its charms as, at times, there's an everyday feel to the thing when the actors aren't trying to desperately oversell their performances. However, the most aggravating aspect is the sheer predictability at times. Viewers should be able to easily intuit the coming action; this doesn't result from foreshadowing but rather poor writing. While some things are left unsaid, one can easily draw conclusions. The film features some major stars which, I imagine, is probably the reason it's received a free pass from so many despite being mostly a forgettable humdrum.

Nine Lives is a collection of related short stories wherein each is a snippet from a woman's life and each shot in one uninterrupted episode. Their themes include parent-child relationships, fractured love, adultery, illness, and death.It is a series of overlapping vignettes, each one running about the same length and told in a single, unbroken take, featuring an ensemble cast that includes Sissy Spacek,Glenn Close,Holly Hunter,Lisa Gay Hamilton,Kathy Baker,Amanda Seyfried,Amy Brenneman,Robin Wright Penn and Elpidia Carrillo among many othersIn these episodes, Holly has a brief moment of reverie while confronting the specters of her past in her old neighborhood. Maggie escorts her young daughter Maria to a cemetery as they visit the graves of their family members. Ruth is a married woman contemplating an affair while visiting Henry in his hotel room. Diana unexpectedly runs into an old boyfriend, Damian, while shopping for groceries. Camilla is a hospital patient awaiting surgery for cancer.Samantha is a teenage girl who helps look after her handicapped father Larry. Sandra is a female prison inmate who is expecting a visit from her children. Sonia lashes out at her boyfriend Martin when she finds out he's been cheating on her. And Lorna has an unexpectedly moving encounter with her ex-husband Andrew as she pays her respects to his second wife, who has just passed away. The film is bolstered by a strong and talented cast ensemble and it features many insightful glimpses into the lives of women from different walks of life.The stories are sketches, often without resolution, and while individual segments succeed admirably, taken together the portraits are a fitful match.Also,it is a movie that demands concentration of the viewer to get the rewards the one is willing to pay attention.Although it is far from a perfect film and some episodes are more interesting and more entertaining than the others,it remains a delight to see.

one who want to see what it's mean "clean acting art" has to see this movie. I am sure that this movie will be one of the best example of how close can the cinema be to the theater (in the good aspect). the movie bring to us nine short stories about women in relation to their daughters, old lovers, fathers, and husbands. the power of this movie coming from the quality of the actresses who play their rules so naturally, so you believe that it is a real their own story. there is no different the age of the actress: all of them present great acting skills, and show us all the personal feeling woman have, until the most intimal senses they feel. I have notice that the common mood this movie show is sadness about the female world. there is no one joke in the film neither a relief thought about the price they have to pay in our world.

In a question and answer session with director Rodrigo Garcia and a handful of the film's cast members (available as a special feature on the DVD release), Garcia says that the motivation behind "Nine Lives" was the idea of looking into people's windows and capturing a moment of their lives in real time, without formal beginning or end. If that is the case, tell me what street these people's houses sit on, and remind me never to live there.This relentlessly sombre film gives us nine vignettes, each focusing on a moment in the life of a woman. Characters from one segment will appear in another, a gimmick that ties into the film's theme of connectedness but that otherwise has become one big mighty cliché in this day of Tarantinos, PT Andersons and Innaritus (who serves as producer on this film, by the way). The biggest flaw is that this gimmick remains just that -- it forces a structured narrative on a film that doesn't need one, but it doesn't bring any additional nuance to the film. For instance, in a segment featuring Lisa Gay Hamilton as a deeply disturbed woman who comes home to settle scores with her father, we find that the character of the father has already appeared in the film's first segment, as a prison warden, but the connection doesn't tell us anything about him, his daughter or their relationship. Hamilton appears as a nurse in a later segment in which a woman (Kathy Baker) is being prepped for a mastectomy, but again, there's no continuity of character -- we don't know how to relate this calm and sedate nurse to the frantic young woman we saw earlier, and Garcia offers no help -- Hamilton could be playing completely different characters.Worst of all, Garcia's vision of life is unnecessarily gloomy and sad. Each woman deals with her own private demon, whether it be lost love, fear of death, loss of a loved one, murderous rage, guilt, regret, bitterness. But the movie is seriously lacking any message of hope. According to Garcia, life is a struggle, but he never illuminates what makes the struggle worthwhile.In any movie like this, the selling point is the acting, and it's no surprise that the performances are what make this film most worth watching. Robin Wright Penn, Kathy Baker and Glenn Close, in particular, do smashing work, and Close's segment, which closes the film, may just take your breath away.Nice try, but not an unequivocal success.Grade: B-