Alicia I love this movie so much

AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Gary The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Prismark10 The casting of a young Jack Nicholson is very much against type and the opening monologue is impressive. Lesser actors would had been blown off course from there.Bruce Dern is also cast against type, playing the loud, showy role as his conman older brother with big dreams and a real estate scam which he ropes Nicholson in, Nicholson being the glass half empty kind of guy is rather negative about it all. Not helped that he is also a depressive.Tagging along with Dern are an older and younger lady who help him hustle and Scatman Crothers plays a type of Mr Big that Dern has seemingly upset.The setting is Atlantic City, before it got knocked down and redeveloped with casinos. In that sense we are seeing a decaying city from the past. The acting is top notch, the story has some surreal elements and part of it is hard to follow. What exactly is going on with the women that Dern has, why did one of them think she was now over the hill and burn all her clothes and the passed the baton to the younger one. It was as if scenes were cut out so you cannot follow the story properly.

MartinHafer You would probably expect a film starring Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern to be emotionally charged and rather exciting. Oddly, the film is the opposite. It's very, very slow and about as exciting as a documentary about cheese making--at least the first 75% of the film. Then, things heat up--but by then, most of the folks watching this film probably will have turned it off.The film begins with Nicholson playing David Staebler--a rather dull man who has a Public Radio sort of show in Philadelphia. Out of the blue, his brother, who he hasn't heard from in over a decade, contacts him and tells him to come Atlantic City for some 'big deal'. Once there, the older brother, Jason (Bruce Dern), tells him about some sort of casino that he's going to be running in Hawaii--but the details are very, very vague. Most of the time, however, instead of working on this deal, Jason just hangs out in a decrepit old hotel with two women--Sally (Ellen Burstyn) and Jessica (Julie Ann Robinson). As the film progresses, the deal seems more and more vague and Jason keeps making promises to David to get him to stay--all the while Sally's mood is incredibly unstable. What comes of all this, eventually, is a bit of a shocker--but not enough to make slogging through the first 75% of the film worth your time. It is interesting to see Nicholson play such a quiet and 'normal' person but other than that, there isn't much to recommend here.

scribling How can this movie have a 6.5 star rating? It's bloody awful! If it weren't for the talent of the cast it'd be completely unwatchable. I'm dumber for having watched it. Here it is in short: People acting as if they're stoned, dialog, dialog, dialog, something dumb happens, dialog, dialog, dialog, someone gets shot, movie over. I don't think it's the director's fault. I don't think anyone could have made this disaster screen worthy. The only reason I watched it in the first place was for research of Atlantic City's boardwalk. I can't write enough about this movie to make the review stick. Who decides a review has to be at least ten lines of text anyway? This is almost as dumb as this movie.

Frances Farmer "The King of Marvin Gardens" is an ensemble piece that turns on the collision of four dysfunctional people. Jack Nicholson plays a perennially depressed, bookish "straight" type opposite the "dynamic" and "goofy" Bruce Dern. Ellen Burstyn and Julia Ann Robinson play, essentially, a mother-step daughter team of hookers. None of these characters is compelling and all of them become quite grating in their various ways; Bruce Dern takes the prize as being the most annoying and tiresome of the bunch.The movie is set in Atlantic City and makes frequent use of the more lurid, campy or bizarre aspects of that location. Unfortunately, the antics of the four main actors are mostly forced, mannered and flat. I found myself cringing at the strained quality of the movie as it reached toward inspiring in the audience some sort of artsy, reverse-chic epiphany it was nowhere near attaining.There really is no plot, and almost any scene could be deleted without affecting the remainder of the film...except for the happy outcome that the thing would be that much shorter. I sat through most of this mess but at a certain point I finally succumbed to my urge to walk out and... walked out. It felt really good to say goodbye to "The King of Marvin Gardens."