Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Justina The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

gothicus-33216 I personally don't like movies with sex scenes and I don't buy a hot blonde teacher- sexually frustrated hot teacher actually- going out with an unattractive cop who doesn't even try yet demonstrates poor social skills and tells his date his true intentions on their first date. sure. the movie really sucks. the actors look bored for the most part. they're not interesting people. the story is stupid. it's about solving murder, so you throw a few random women and a few cops and a bunch of sex scenes plus some personal stories until the killer is caught. ugh

TxMike It was 1993 and Jane Campion made "The Piano". I enjoyed that movie, even though the characters are all very strange. But of all her movies I believe I enjoyed that one most.Then in 1999 she made "Holy Smoke." That one started well with interesting characters but the second half just wasn't very interesting.Now I have come to look up an old movie I missed, "In the Cut" from 2013. It has a number of really fine actors so I looked forward to it. Overall I came away very disappointed. Yes, Meg Ryan as Frannie, miss sweetness, bares it all. It was really strange seeing her naked and in sexual situations. Jennifer Jason Leigh as her sister Pauline is sad and skanky. Ruffalo as Detective Malloy is busy in bed and busy in investigations, but he never seems to accomplish much.I know that in the real world people lead sad lives and make bad decisions, sometimes people get murdered, but they usually have some fun and joy also. This movie has no joy, it is a burden to watch.I'd guess that Jane Campion fans really like this movie, but I don't.

ForVirg Right off the bat I must say that I agree with another reviewer here who mentioned Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance and character as the bright spot in this dismal (literally and figuratively) movie.I've never been a huge fan of Leigh's, but she does a terrific acting job with what she's been handed. Also, her character is the only human who ever smiles at all through the entirety of this dark-and-dismal-merely-for-the-sake-of-being-dark-and-dismal movie.And there is my first criticism. It is far more effective to let the flow of natural human behavior take the viewer to a troubling place in the psyche than it is to try to do so by skipping story development and just having all the characters behave morose and bizarrely at all times and by using shadowy lighting.This movie made me feel very sad for Meg Ryan. I actually watched the film solely because I thought it would be good to see Ryan have a chance to exercise her acting muscles instead of once again playing the formulaic perky romantic interest role that has made her famous.Actually, Ryan IS very talented and would be excellent in a robustly dark role. I wish she would have chosen a more well-written script than this predictable and boring yawner.This movie lives way down to my lowest expectations of modern movie-making with all the attendant predictable moments: sex scenes where power and dominance game playing between the partners is supposed to create intense tension (have these writers never had an actual moment of intense sexual attraction allowed to simmer? It doesn't appear that way, so sad for them); blurry and shaky camera work that is supposed to add I don't know what exactly; and dark, dismal, depressed and angry people who apparently have zero personality.It is this last criticism which bothers me the most about this horrible waste of time. I'm no fan of predictability in modern films, but when that predictability is presented within a story of one-dimensional characters with less depth of personality than a computer game character, it is beyond frustrating.There is no shortage of talented and imaginative writers in this world. Why on earth Hollywood persists in rewarding hack writing is beyond me.

MBunge This could have been the greatest erotic thriller ever made and no one would have ever noticed because of the thrice-damned nonsense director Jane Campion does here playing around with the focus on her cameras. In The Cut being several light years away from even being a good erotic thriller only makes things worse.Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan) is a New York City English professor. She's the sort of repressed type who gets all quivery over snippets of passionate poetry she sees plastered up in the subway. Frannie has a screwed-up sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who's borderline stalking a married man, an unstable ex-boyfriend (Kevin Bacon) with an ugly dog and she's writing a book on urban slang with the help of one of her huge, black students (Sharrieff Pugh). When a woman's severed head is found in the community garden of Frannie's apartment building, she meets Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo). The cop has all the sophistication of a walking hard on, so of course he and Frannie fall into bed together. But as more dismembered women show up, Frannie begins to suspect there's more to Malloy than his penis and cheesy mustache.That's about it for the plot of In The Cut. It's one of those willfully idiotic plots where the whole shebang hangs on people not asking painfully obvious questions and avoiding saying the first things that would come to any normal person's mind. Basically, Frannie Avery lolls around, gets screwed, lolls around, gets screwed, lolls around, almost gets killed, fade to black.I don't know what bug crawled up Campion's ass when it came time to make this film, which is one of the most annoying and aggravating movies I've ever watched. Not because the acting is terrible. It isn't. And not because the writing is dreadful, even though it is. It's not even because of the unremitting camera movement that plagues every scene and makes one of them look like it was filmed on top of a 1965 washing machine.No, what dooms In The Cut is exasperating games Campion plays with focus. Virtually ever single shot in the whole flick is out of focus in one way or another. Sometimes things are clear in the middle of the image and the edges are fuzzy. Sometimes the focus goes in and out. Sometimes the background is out of focus, sometimes it's the foreground and sometimes it's the focal point of the shot. Watching this thing is like wearing eyeglasses with the wrong prescription. I'm sure Campion had some point for doing it this way but I don't give two jerks what the reason might be because it wasn't good enough.This movie is also quiet to the point of distraction and so slow that you'll feel like you're watching it on the event horizon of a black hole. Meg Ryan does get naked and there's a bit of fellatio that's more graphic than anything outside The Brown Bunny, but neither will rouse you of the sleepy, weary, apathetic trance you'll fall into after 5 minutes of In The Cut.And don't let Ryan's nudity tempt you. There could be a Sapphic mosh pit in the middle of the movie with Ryan, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledell and this piece of crap still wouldn't be worth renting.