Reptileenbu Did you people see the same film I saw?

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

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

Curt Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Rodrigo Amaro The cast of actors involved in this film would be enough to make me want to see this but something on the trivia section was even more instigating and then I went ahead. There, it was quoted about how the movie was incredibly overlooked by audiences and awards in the year of its release despite receiving favorite reviews from top critics who put this film as one of the top 10 best of 2005. Is it all that good? No, I'm afraid, I've seen better films that year. It is a good film but it doesn't fit such bill.In the sense of avoiding old conceits, the vignettes of "Nive Lives" are above the average, which is always good in a world where repetitive stories become box-office hits immediately because most audiences like to know where they're stepping. But, when you see the film as a whole there are times you start to feel out of the experience, left out, trying to comprehend why all the stories doesn't have an ending and why would you embark in such journey if it never puts a dot in its discourses?The nine lives of nine female characters are presented in nine short stories of 12 minutes approximately (filmed in one take each, no cuts), sometimes connecting with each other throughout its characters, other times they're just there, forming an emotional connection between them all. There, powerful and moving stories like the sudden encounter between a former couple (Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs) in a supermarket, trying to restart from the point they ended (my favorite segment of all); or the meeting between mother and daughter (played by Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning) talking about things of life and death; the woman (Kathy Baker) fighting against the cancer, being faithfully supported by her husband (Joe Mantegna); and many others stories. What writer and director Rodrigo Garcia makes with all of this is to present a clear and real portrayal of how tough is to be a woman, their desires, fears, wishes, worries and how all of this are perceived in different worlds going from a prison (through the eyes of a female prison inmate) to the simple housewife, mothers, daughters, sisters, etc.In a way, I found "Nine Lives" reduced to an certain simplicity, quite shallow, since the director haven't extended that to more possibilities and realities, I mean, where's the powerful women of the world? Where were the hard working professionals or even the ones who go through a lot of trouble dealing with abusive husbands, uncaring sons, that kind of characters? To me, he reduced some of the characters to the extent of being romantic figures coming out of an average literature. However, this wasn't the worst problem with this film. The thing that bothered me most was how wearing this film could be as it unfolds with all those vignettes, some very interesting to see, others thoroughly tiresome, boring to the point of asking yourself what you're doing there watching this, a purpose. This movie would be perfect if Garcia would select three stories presented here, make them longer and with a conclusion just like the ones Rebecca Miller presented in "Personal Velocity". Some stories were so engaging, so brilliantly created that when it ended I was like "No, keep going. Why stop here?" and I'm sure this infatuated lots of viewers (I had a similar experience in "Paris Je t'aime" but that's a different story and a better film).I can and will suggest this film but only go after if you like the actors involved with it (cast includes Aidan Quinn, Ian McShane, Amanda Seyfried, Sissy Spacek, Lisa Guy Hamilton, Miguel Sandoval, Stephen Dillane, Holly Hunter and others) or if you like film in this style. "Nine Lives" could have been more than it is but it's poetic message and its themes certainly are good enough to be appreciated by its audiences. 7/10

Cedric_Catsuits After two and a half lives I was already bored with this, but I stuck with it to the end. Having looked at it from every conceivable angle, I can only conclude that this is one of the most tedious and confusing films I've ever watched.There is no cohesion here, nothing to link all the pieces together. it's pretty much like watching snippets of nine films, then being told they didn't bother finishing them.For what it's worth, the performances from the actors are generally good. Then again, it's not like they had much to do.This is the work of a muddled, warped and depressed mind. I guess I should blame the writer. It's self-indulgent, dull, baffling, pretentious twaddle. There is a fine line between art and madness: this is madness.

grettahansing I am so sad to have to rate this a 1 out of 10. It was a total 10 until the out-of-the-blue ending. The actors were fabulous. You just have to know going into it that nothing is really resolved or figured out by the viewer. You watch very engaging snippets of women's harried lives, yet the whole experience leaves the viewer wanting more. More of an explanation, more of a follow-through. It's like reading the middle of a wonderfully gripping book, but then having no beginning and no ending. Each chapter on each woman had so much depth and intrigue, but again, you never find out why things are like they are or where things are going when they could take on so many different pathways. There's so much potential to see where the women end up, or what decisions they make based on little morsels of potential truths. I felt I was led to believe there would be more, but then the movie was over. I was disappointed, all in all.

evanston_dad In a question and answer session with director Rodrigo Garcia and a handful of the film's cast members (available as a special feature on the DVD release), Garcia says that the motivation behind "Nine Lives" was the idea of looking into people's windows and capturing a moment of their lives in real time, without formal beginning or end. If that is the case, tell me what street these people's houses sit on, and remind me never to live there.This relentlessly sombre film gives us nine vignettes, each focusing on a moment in the life of a woman. Characters from one segment will appear in another, a gimmick that ties into the film's theme of connectedness but that otherwise has become one big mighty cliché in this day of Tarantinos, PT Andersons and Innaritus (who serves as producer on this film, by the way). The biggest flaw is that this gimmick remains just that -- it forces a structured narrative on a film that doesn't need one, but it doesn't bring any additional nuance to the film. For instance, in a segment featuring Lisa Gay Hamilton as a deeply disturbed woman who comes home to settle scores with her father, we find that the character of the father has already appeared in the film's first segment, as a prison warden, but the connection doesn't tell us anything about him, his daughter or their relationship. Hamilton appears as a nurse in a later segment in which a woman (Kathy Baker) is being prepped for a mastectomy, but again, there's no continuity of character -- we don't know how to relate this calm and sedate nurse to the frantic young woman we saw earlier, and Garcia offers no help -- Hamilton could be playing completely different characters.Worst of all, Garcia's vision of life is unnecessarily gloomy and sad. Each woman deals with her own private demon, whether it be lost love, fear of death, loss of a loved one, murderous rage, guilt, regret, bitterness. But the movie is seriously lacking any message of hope. According to Garcia, life is a struggle, but he never illuminates what makes the struggle worthwhile.In any movie like this, the selling point is the acting, and it's no surprise that the performances are what make this film most worth watching. Robin Wright Penn, Kathy Baker and Glenn Close, in particular, do smashing work, and Close's segment, which closes the film, may just take your breath away.Nice try, but not an unequivocal success.Grade: B-