Wordiezett So much average

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

TxMike I am a parent but have never lost a child. I would think it would be very hard, but even harder to have lost one not to death but to kidnapping. In that case you never really know what happened, you don't know if you will ever see the child again, you have no closure.That is the theme of this movie. Sigourney Weaver is Julia Sandburg, happily married mother of two, and moonlights as a lounge singer. But one day at the park, when it was time to go, she turns her back just for a few seconds and then finds that her 3-year-old daughter Maggie is gone. She searches, frantically, everyone else has left, she cannot find her daughter.The movie resumes 16 years later, she has returned to New York after some time working in Canada for a bank. We see that her marriage did not survive the loss of the child. Julia changed, she did not cope well at all. She was no longer the healthy, happy person her family knew before the incident.In a chance meeting Julia comes upon Kate Bosworth as Louise who appears to be homeless. Louise tells her that she is from Michigan, needs money to get home, and Louise gives her $700. It all turns out to be a ruse, as Julia discovers quickly, but for some reason she takes Louise into her apartment, gives her an extra key, and tells her she can stay as long as she wants.It seems that Julia is somehow hoping this is really her long-lost daughter Maggie. Even though she never verifies that (including not seeing a leg birthmark) she projects her motherhood on this young woman, and it helps bring her out of her grief and begin to get on with life. Including establishing a relationship again with her son and his new wife.Her son is Alessandro Nivola as Chris. Her new daughter-in-law is Keri Russell as Celeste.Good movie, Weaver is superb as usual. She even does her own singing (according to the credits) in a brief lounge episode early in the movie.

dbdumonteil Another movie which owes a lot to Sigourney Weaver's talent.She excels in portraying mothers with a strong guilty feeling (see "a map of the world" ).She is sadly unsupported by the rest of the cast ,but one must write that their caricatured bourgeois straight characters (particularly the daughter-in-law and Weaver's listless husband) throw the movie off balance.All that concerns the mother ,desperately trying to recreate a dear one gone for a long time (when she was a little girl) ,is sometimes interesting.It does not renew the subject ,as old as the hills (Hitchcock's "Vertigo"(1958) ;Feyder's "Le Grand Jeu"(1934);Claude Miller's "Mortelle Randonnée" (1983) Losey's " secret Ceremony" (1968):Losey's movie depicting a "mother"/"daughter" relationship is similar to "the girl..." if we reverse the roles).Best moment:Weaver thanking her family for welcoming "Maggie" .

therunner42 I was really excited when I saw The Girl in the Park DVD on the shelf at my local video store. I really liked Keri Russell in Felicity and the story, about how a mother copes with the disappearance of her daughter looked interesting too. However, that was the last time I felt good about this movie. The script, while based on an intriguing premise, is slow and unrealistic. Sigourney Weaver as the mother and Kate Bosworth play flawed characters that are utterly unlike able. The scenes are drawn out and the one moment where there could have been some action is cut, leaving the events up to the audience's imagination. In fact too much of the movie is left to the audience and whilst I don't mind doing some of the work you expect the director and scriptwriter to do their parts too. My advice is, despite the stellar cast, leave this one alone, it is drivel!!!!

Siamois While Girl in the Park is never great, it manages to be a solid drama about the loss of a young child and its effect on a mother (Sigourney Weaver).Everything here is well crafted but a little bland and formulaic. We meet tons of characters who have the seeds to provide good drama but many of them (The ex husband, the son, the romantic interest at the office, the daughter in law and her pregnancy) are left with unfinished business by the end of the movie, feeling like little more than plot points. As for Louise, for all the flashiness she offers, she brings very little to the table in the end.In the end, you will feel you have spent a nice evening. The cast does a nice job. Sigourney Weaver gives some soul to her performance and Kate Bosworth is very well cast and provides some sparks and a nice contrast to Weaver.It's a good movie, but not a great one. Some more development, some twists and turns in the second half of the movie would have considerably improved the movie. Instead, we're left with a cheap Hollywood ending, the catalyst of which is too dumb to even write down here.Worth watching as a rental if you like dramas.