Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Merolliv I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

antoniotierno Movie goers have a sort of fascination with watching less-than-smart people do really stupid thing, exactly what drives film noir and many of the best crime dramas. "The Square," from Australia, certainly fits that reasoning. We watch the bottom drop out of the lives of many different characters destroying each other and themselves, with things going wrong for everyone. Edgerton is brilliantly merciless in moving the story forward, as along the way, we'll encounter blackmail, murder (unintentional and otherwise) and more, some of it brutal, some of it weird. Roberts makes for a most worried-looking protagonist, seemingly wearing each new disaster with a deeper furrow in his brow. Van der Boom is effective at never letting us really know what she's thinking, while Hayes is nicely creepy as the no-good Smithy.

Aristides-2 When the dog got killed I laughed, soft-hearted dog lover that I am, because the Dog was standing in for the Square. (And what a dog! Able to race through neighborhoods, swim a river and then run through yet another neighborhood to find his cutie!) Come to think of it, the two owners of the dogs, in the opening sequence, while hooking up, had both dogs in the same car. Maybe the director's cut will open on the two dogs having a go of it and then pan over to Ray and Carla getting it on. But seriously..... By not showing a compelling reason, other than sex, in even one scene, I had increasing difficulty over Ray's willingness to dump everything for the sake of his sex mate. And jumping to the end of the movie, after a badly staged scene of Carla getting killed.....and the camera-on-a-crane showing a disconsolate and bloody Ray walking down the street away from the carnage, one is supposed to say 'tsk-tsk' poor guy. But I didn't have any sympathy for either Carla or Ray at that point. How do you sympathize with characters who have little character and who you don't like?Other more technical annoyances were a couple of impenetrable accents and also poor casting choices which made it confusing to know who was who.Why did Lenny steal the generator? And what did he have on Ray?It also wasn't enough to kill, in a road accident, the suspicious foreman but the writers had to also place an infant in the vehicle.After a break in, wouldn't the obvious thing to happen, with all the materials lying around, be the hiring of a security guard?And pray tell how did the boss-of-bosses and the law know about the blackmailing? More important, how were they going to resolve the serious breach of the law that they were involved in?There really were more silly things gathering along the way but you get the idea.....

PresidentForLife Unlike some rapturous reviewers, I don't get the appeal of this movie at all. It is violent, senseless, and then violent some more. Why is everyone in Australia heavily armed, except our hero? The performances are fine, but what good is that if the movie is too long and the plot hard to follow? If you want to see a coherent drama concerning a big bag of hot cash, rent "A Simple Plan" and call it good. (Length requirements constrain me to add that the movie concerns a married man and a married woman who want to run off together. She spots a stash of cash her husband has hidden in the attic, and they scheme to get it by - hiring an arsonist to burn the house down after she steals it! Unfortunately, that doesn't work out too well because the arsonist's girlfriend doesn't get to him in time to call the whole thing off, and the husband isn't fooled anyway. Meanwhile, hero has some cash flow problems of his own by taking a kickback at work. A character who threatens to expose him impales himself accidentally, but our hero feels compelled to bury the body secretly anyway. The two schemes of thievery are vainly interwoven as if they somehow share a parallel theme other than concerning stolen money, but the Edgertons just aren't that skilled at the loom.)

tigerfish50 "The Square" opens with two parked cars at a scenic overlook. In one of them, two agitated dogs observe the other vehicle where their respective owners, Ray and Carla, are engaging in some steamy extra-marital gymnastics. When Carla returns home from her tryst, she spots her rough diamond husband surreptitiously hiding a bag of cash in the ceiling of their washroom, whereupon she conceives the idea to steal the money and run off with her paramour to begin a new life together. Construction site manager Ray declines to go along with her scheme at first, anticipating a boatload of trouble fouling up his sweet kickback scam at work, but Carla's alluring charms soon prove too strong a temptation. The lovers hire themselves a dubious partner, lash together a leaky plan and set it in motion, only to meet with a firestorm of foul-ups, suspicion and terror."The Square" shares many themes and motifs with "Body Heat" and "Blood Simple". The chief differences are its gritty realism and fast pacing - and it also boasts an extensive cast of support roles that provide a bewildering array of possibilities for misunderstandings and betrayal among the various conspirators, victims and bystanders as their lives spiral out of control. By the time the dust has cleared at the conclusion, one begins to wonder if the phrase 'ratcheting up the tension' might not have been coined for this film. Nash Edgerton directs his brother Joel's tight script with verve, and extracts intense and believable performances from his actors. It all adds up to an impressive modern Indie film noir.