Very well executed

Truly Dreadful Film

Brilliant and touching

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Well casted, well acted, well filmed... all of which makes this complete nothing of a film more irritating.An incessantly interrupted dinner...which I realize is the point, but after about the tenth halt to all action just for the point of being frustrating... got more and more tedious as each pretentious and overwraught course was served. Two couples, related, arguing about long-held grudges, moving slowly, slowly, slowly to the point: a serious incident involving their children. Very serious.The tense relationships between all parties is revealed slowly slowly slowly via flashbacks, as is the incident in question.Then we reach a scene which should be the climax, but the movie ends mid-scene with no resolution and we are taken to the credits.No resolution.No character arcs.No plot developments.Just a lot of backstory and a really frustrating and pretentious meal.If you want to be put into an irritated mood with a general desire to slap every person you see for the next several hours, by all means, subject yourself to this self-indulgent bit of nothing. I'm pretty sure that the entire message of the movie is: Don't refuse the dessert course, you will piss off the wait-staff and they will argue with you about your poor choice. It was the only coherent scene in the entire miasma of irritation.

This is a terrible movie. Two sons of one of the families burn a homeless lady to death, and 3 of the 4 parents involved are perfectly fine with covering up the crime. They argue forever and the one parent (Richard Gere's character), that wants to do the right thing is finally worn down and agrees to go along with the cover-up. This movie is the kind of amoral drivel that rightfully gives Hollywood a bad name. And it is also extremely boring. I will be more careful to read reviews so I avoid this kind of excrement in the future. Hopefully, this review will help spare someone the loss of two hours of their life watching absolute garbage. I would have given it zero stars if I could.

I almost decided not to watch this movie given the low ratings, but I'm glad I did as I generally prefer to ignore the biases of others, and try to view a film with my own frame of reference. I suppose if you are the type of moviegoer who is predisposed to action/adventure/thriller genres, then this dialog-based drama may not be your cup of tea. The cast was excellent in this movie, and the script was well written. There were a few really good lines in this movie, as the main characters try to navigate through a moral dilemma involving the actions of their sons, against the backdrop of a haute cuisine dinner in an upscale restaurant. In particular, the interaction with the staff and presentation of the food by the Maître D' over the course of the dinner was priceless. I have to admit the whole Gettysburg reference may not resonate well for non-American audiences, but I presume it is trying to present an analogy with internal family strife that is at the heart of this film. The ending of the movie may not satisfy everyone, but it certainly presents a view of a family in decline as their moral compasses adjust in an attempt to resolve an internal dichotomy of fundamental rights and wrongs.

Of course there aren't two kinds of people, that would be a stupid thing to say, but in the spirit of most of the reviews of this film let's just say...there are two kinds of people, those allergic to intelligence and those allergic to stupidity. This film is just too damn demanding on so many levels - most of America will have a migraine fifteen minutes in trying to understand the language, sort through all of the relationships, follow the plot, and so on, that they'll give up. Too bad. The movie is a remarkable look at how some (perhaps most?) among the very wealthy feel above it all (above the rest of us), including above the law. Masterful direction, cinematography, writing, and acting, with an amazing score. This and "Ladybird" were my favorite films of the year.