That was an excellent one.

ridiculous rating

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Existing reviews have at least one thing right: the camera work is impressive: very long takes with no cuts. But in just about every other respect this movie is amateurish, treats women as in a cheap 1960s porn movie and features cringe-worthy writing. Amateurish to the hilt. A few very good actors cannot save the adolescent, self-conscious dialog. The bad actors don't help either. The estimable John Hawkes is a round peg in the square hole of this movie. We stopped watching after 40 minutes.

I love film noir and I like indie films, but I found very little to like in this one. For starters, the film is shot in chapters, and each 15-minute chapter (they seem much longer than that, trust me) is a single unbroken hand-held shot. Why? you ask. Absolutely no idea. But the result of this gratuitous construct is that each conversation (and the movie is mostly endless conversation) involves the handheld camera panning from one speaker to the next speaker and back again, over and over and over again. This contributes to a growing sense of vertigo in the viewer as the film progresses. And in the unlikely event that you can get past that, then you've got the script to deal with - an absolutely preposterous and nonsensical hodge-podge of secret identities and hidden relationships that makes not one iota of sense. Mr. Hawkes seems to have cut out a career for himself playing essentially sleaze-bag end-of-the-line private investigators: he recently reprised almost the identical role in another awful film called Small Town Crime. He and some of the other actors are competent, but there is simply nothing to be done with a script this inept.

Too Late is halfway decent noir story anchored by a more than decent lead, but it lets itself get swallowed by its gimmicks. The movie is presented as a series of five twenty-odd minute one-take shots, with mixed results. The opening segment has some neat tricks behind it, including getting star John Hawkes from one end of town to another while maintaining action at a fixed point, and the reveals in the last are effective. But not all of the actors are up to the task, and the reliance on the one-take structure don't do them any favours; many of the scenes in the second section, in particular, have a student-play vibe to them, despite the presence of known names like Robert Forster and Jeff Fahey (Dichen Lachman, however, acquits herself well as a twist on the no-nonsense stripper trope). The nonlinear structure also feels like an afterthought to add some unnecessary extra novelty. The sidebars the movie somehow finds time for don't always work, such as a pair of minor drug dealers with no real purpose other than to pad out the takes and the film's annoying insistence on using film itself as a source of dialogue far too often. If it lost its gimmicks and shed a bit of fat, Too Late has the bones of a good gumshoe flick, albeit one a bit too reliant on stuffing women in refrigerators.

Greetings again from the darkness. The first feature film from writer/director Dennis Hauck has a number of elements that are appealing to movie lovers on the lookout for something a bit outside the box. It's the type of film that would be a festival favorite, as it provides no shortage of "talking points" for discussion afterwards.Of course, casting John Hawkes is always a good start. Here he plays a Private Investigator named Sampson. The story is presented in 5 segments – each filmed in one extended shot. Oh, and it's not presented in sequential order, so some assembly is required. The real end to the story is not the same as the ending of the movie, and the beginning of the story is actually in the middle of the movie. Confused yet? Well a loss of equilibrium is what makes this one so much fun to watch. Characters and story lines are intertwined - some accidentally, some secretly, and some surprisingly.Hawkes appears in each of the five segments, and sprinkled throughout you will find such recognizable faces as Robert Forster, Jeff Fahey, Natalie Zea, Joanna Cassidy, Crystal Reed, Dash Mihok, Rider Strong, Vail Bloom, Sydney Tamilia Poitier and singer Sally Jaye. A strip club, the Hollywood hills, a Park Ranger, a suicide, and multiple murders all are key pieces to the puzzle … and none are presented exactly as we would expect.With an unpolished 1970's look and feel, the film offers a touch of Tarantino (including some of the actors who have worked with him), but mostly the vibe is refreshingly throwback. Even the music … Joe Tex, Cowboy Junkies, etc … is a bit offbeat, and of course, any movie that references Genevieve Bujold and Choose Me deserves a special place in my heart. It may not be the typically structured PI murder mystery that we have come to expect, but an unusual approach and the performance of Hawkes, makes this one to see.