Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

When you hear about a romantic comedy in which an editor visited a secluded ex-writer won't impress you. And when the first fifteen minutes of the movie show some stereotypical images of rural Italy, you might even pass on it. Exactly out of these overplayed scenes bordering with B-comedy The Shadows in the Sun started to develop.Eventually, we remained within romantic comedy genre, yet it gets the maximum out of it. At first the characters seemed as if they came from a regular romantic novel, but this evened out to create a framework for some genuine emotion, despite occasional cheesy moments.If Harvey Keitel was the expected heavyweight in the artistic crew, Claire Forlani was an unexpected surprise. She looked better than ever and mastered a perfect Italian accent.We might argue what the purpose of cinema should be, but Shadows in the Sun was one of those movies that made me feel good without boring me or making me feel stupid. And this is a rare quality, in particular in romantic comedy.

One life touches another – but sometimes one life pushes another into change. A young, structured, yuppie book editor is sent to Tuscany to convince a reclusive, eccentric brilliant author to return to writing by signing a book deal with his publishing house. In the process of pressing for what his boss wants, he discovers more about the man behind the words, as well as himself. The question is who is going to help who win the battle of realizing ones dreams.How this film escaped the attention of the Academy Awards Committee is beyond me. It starts with one of the most intelligently and beautifully crafted scripts that has ever been written, weaving a simple plot line with exquisite dialogue and very powerful human emotions. The cast is phenomenal. Every performance is so strong yet subtle, it is impossible to imagine anyone else in any of the roles, and leaves you wanting to know more about every character. The direction is exactly what it should be – a synthesis of all creative efforts from all of the diverse inputs. The movie is also sculpted with magnificent cinematography, and of course, topped off with an amazing sound track.You will LOVE this movie if you enjoy any of these: artistic dialogue, great performances, breathtaking visuals, subtlety, honesty, dreamers, or romance.

The score given to this film on IMDb almost discouraged me from seeing it, but I knew Claire Forlani would put on a great performance. I wasn't disappointed.Like many other reviewers have pointed out, this movie lacks explosions and world-saving heroes, big bad conspiracies or someone with terminal illnesses. But it's honest and warm.I wish Forlani would be given more lead roles. She has one of the most expressive faces in Hollywood - count the number of scenes where she doesn't speak a word. (Unfortunately, in last year's Carolina Moon she appeared to have caught the contagious Hollywood disease of anorexia.) Harvey Keitel seems relaxed and comfortable despite - or perhaps because of - this being an atypical role. He played it perfectly.Joshua Jackson was probably weakest, partly because I felt his character wasn't as filled out as it could have been. Having "killed off" his family back in London and giving him a job with poor prospects, it seemed too easy to make him stay in Tuscany. The movie was about Keitel, though, so the producer or director probably didn't want to clutter it with too much going on. Jackson did the job though and supported by a talented cast, it was more than enough.Not a movie to watch if you want to be thrilled or scared or interested in the lives of celebrities, but a good weekend afternoon experience it was for me.

It is predictable, it has a lot of clichés, it doesn't aspire to be even nearer to what would be called a great film, or even a good one - or even a hit -, but its dialogues are fine and truthful, and reveal an experienced knowledge of a writer's craft and soul and suffering. As the comment above put it, it's a film of real people with real problems, apparently common and minor problems to the viewer who expects to extract some titillation out of films - the characters here are not involved in intrigues, in hiding a murder or escape from it -, but problems hard enough for those involved. As we learn somewhere: there is no order of difficulty in problems, one is not "harder" or "bigger" than another. They are all the same. The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, who spent four years in a concentration camp, tells in "Man's Search for Meaning", in an almost candid way, that his terrible sufferings there at the camp doesn't amount to anything bigger than anyone's. He makes a perfect analogy, and with the most frightening element an inmate of a concentration camp could think of: "A man's suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative".Well, it seems a lot of thinking to draw from such an unpretentious film, but I think in that resides its merits. Keitel's outstanding performance adds a lot to it, it's on a level much higher than the whole production. It's amazing how great actors can have some of their great moments in lesser films, as Keitel here, or as Morgan Freeman unique, out-of-bounds performance in "Street Wise".