Best movie of this year hands down!

Wonderfully offbeat film!

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Entertaining, but stupid.Let's cut to the chase here.The Spanish character is obvious some kind of a shady sleazeball, a fact that Anderson misuses to manipulate the viewer into believing that Woody's disappearance is a result of murder. After all, the Spaniard had a motive (flimsy as it was, i.e. sexual attraction toward Emily whom he'd met just a day earlier) and a sort-of opportunity (the sort-of isolated setting of abandoned trains at a train station basically teeming with people). Dumber still, the drug dealer even held a metal rod in his hands, looking determined to whack Woody from behind. It was a foregone conclusion. Now, maybe some viewers enjoy or at least don't mind being cheated, manipulated and lied to by the director and/or screenwriter – but I certainly don't. These Agatha Christie-like shticks are so cheesy, and such cheap shots at getting easy thrills. Turns out Woody is OK. (Huh? So the drug-dealer holding a metal rod was just a plot-device to create misguided suspense?) Turns out Woody is a nimrod who managed to miss a train in the middle of bloody nowhere in the middle of bloody Siberia. I don't know anybody that stupid. Turns out Emily cares so little about her husband's whereabouts that she'd actually board a train in the middle of a distant foreign region without checking if her husband also boarded it; very shaky script-writing indeed. Anderson would have us believe that this married couple was laid in an ostrich egg just the other day, that they are imbecility personified. OK, then, if they're such cretins, why would we even give a hoot? Wouldn't their character description be more suited to a comedy then?So between the half-baked logic, the forced plot-devices, and the director's blatant deception of the viewer, there isn't much hope for the rest of the movie at this point. And I was proved correct. Emily realizes what a dubious character the Spaniard must be, yet she agrees to join him on a long-winded excursion to a remote, abandoned Siberian church. Predictably, things go bad there. Rape is in the air, and if as viewers we could see Emily under potential threat, then how could Emily herself not see this coming? This guy was practically breathing down her neck for days for an opportunity to shag her – not to mention his blatant flirtation just the day before in the hotel. Surprisingly, she turns out to be a bit of a whore, and at first reacts positively to the Spaniard's groping. But then guilt kicks in, she changes her mind, and murders him. Similar to that idiotic Oscar-winning movie with Matt Damon playing a closet homosexual killing his friend on a boat – it's the kind of bizarre turn of events. So far so weird. So not only is she a slut, but also a murderess as well. And we should give a hoot about whether she gets caught, because? Conveniently, it turns out later that he is a convicted rapist, so that washes her of her guilt. Sort of.The coincidences keep piling up. Woody just happened to bump into drugs detective Ben, and from here on the plot goes into Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck territory for while: will Ben catch Emily with the drugs or won't he? She struggles – and I mean she really struggles – to get rid of a small batch of heroin-filled babushka dolls. No train windows or doors will open, but isn't that always the case? She can't even get to throw the drugs on a garbage dump on the train station coz Ben is right there, breathing down her neck, appearing always just in time, like some Swiss-watch demon. And she fails. And oh, how she fails, over and over again - just like in a Roadrunner cartoon. I kind of started losing tension regarding the plot, at this point. I actually found myself amused rather than thrilled.The cartoonishness goes into extra gear when Emily almost falls out of a speeding train! Another scene that might remind us older film-goers of the Golden Age of Silent Comedy. Turns out that Ben somehow managed to pull off a logistical feat by packing the Americans into a phantom train with only a few wagons and no other passengers. Apparently, he left the back door of the train open, just so the audience can have a cliffhanger? I can't really think of a better reason, because he actually did need Emily alive in order to find the drug money.It gets better. I mean, dumber. Ben kicks the pair out of the train in the middle of Siberia – with no coats – and they proceed to walk (and somehow not freeze to death) to a remote hanger-and-helicopter place. At this point, I was expecting nothing less than aliens. I was expecting a UFO, and a plot-twist about how the Spaniard was a rapist from the Andromeda galaxy, the son of an influential intergalactic politician, and Ben was a secret CIA agent sent to clear up a mess that could have serious consequences for Earth's relations with planet Zong.But no. The movie goes into Hostel territory. It's not sci-fi, but still within the realm of fantasy. Predictably, Ben turns out to be part of the drug-cartel. Soon we have the Spaniard's girlfriend lying in a pool of blood, tortured as if by the Spanish Inquisition, and yet this girl finds the strength to firmly grasp at Emily's hand, demanding like an enraged lunatic that she tell her of his whereabouts. Another very dumb scene.Afterwards, the movie goes into Hollywood–thriller nonsense overdrive, when the American pair pulls off one of the most ludicrous escapes in any remote region in a silly thriller ever. Not one of Anderson's better movies.

(46%) An oddly unlikeable Russian set thriller that fails to draw out enough intrigue from a plot that should have had it by the bucket load. This may have a good cast and a bit of money behind it, but it's more Roger Corman than it is Alfred Hitchcock, yet no one told the editor so this is a good twenty or so minutes too long. On a plus side this is largely still a decent watch. The direction is fine, the performances are better than the script deserves, and there are much worse thrillers out there. By the end what your left with is a simple time-passer that has strokes of quality but will struggle to last in the memory banks for very long, if at all.

Not much of a movie. After the first five minutes almost right up to the end its deathly dull with Woody hideously miscast as a mid-western hardware store owner. As a traveling couple on a train in a foreign country, Woody and his sourpuss wife make ya want to move to the other end of the car. The bad guys might as well have big signs around their necks saying 'Look no farther, its ME'. Ben Kingsley is good but he's always good. Too bad he's missing in action for most of the film. The plot is contrived with an overload of 'tense' moments. Mercifully, the movie ends. If you like nice scenery and trains, go for it. If you like to have at least some challenge as a viewer, skip it. And if you didn't know it before, Siberia can be cold and often has snow. The movie goes to great lengths to point that out.

Russian police detective Ilya Grinko (Ben Kingsley) investigates a likely gangland murder for drugs in Vladivostok. Roy (Woody Harrelson) and Jessie (Emily Mortimer) are Christian missionaries taking the train from Beijing to Moscow. He befriends cabin mates Spanish Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) and his girlfriend Abby (Kate Mara). Roy is trusting while Jessie has her suspicions. Carlos is transporting a collection of souvenir matryoshka dolls. After a stop, Jessie finds Roy missing from the train. Assuming he missed the train, she leaves at the next stop to wait for Roy. Carlos and Abby get off with her. The next day, Carlos takes Jessie to an abandoned church. He tries something which escalates into Jessie killing Carlos. She returns to the train and finds Roy with a new cabin mate in Grinko.There's a train. There's an attempt at suspense. It's looking like a Hitchcock movie. However there are things that keep gnawing at me. First of all, I doubt anybody transports drugs from Beijing into Russia. It just makes no sense. It's tough enough to get drugs into China with the death penalty as your reward. Why would anybody keep transporting it around? Just sell it in China. I buy that drugs come into Vladivostok but why bring it into China just to go back into Russia. It's not a short cut anybody with drugs would ever take.As for movie, it's not that suspenseful. The characters are more annoying than anything. I didn't particularly like Roy or Jessie. They are annoyingly naive. It's some kind of stereotype of Christian missionaries. I also don't really understand why Carlos is waving the dolls around. People just act strangely. Roy seems completely clueless. Carlos seems like such a clingy bad guy that I can't buy Jessie's flirtiness unless they give me a reason like Jessie and Roy have sex problems. In general, I have problems with these character doing what they do. As the story gets more and more twisty, I lose more and more interest. I never buy into these people and I don't care about their predicaments.