Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

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.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Rich Wright Four interconnecting stories: The main one being a woman argues with her elderly, busybody mum about a possible move to Australia for her and her son after the untimely death of her hubby. Meanwhile, said teen has his first sexual experience with a girl who's been stalking him for months. Also on the agenda are two boys adventures while playing truant from school, and a couple of old friends taking a coach ride to attend a funeral. All this is set in the template of a very wintry Scotland, where even the sea has frozen over.A slow burning meditation on life among different generations, it manages to be quietly moving without having to resort to overdramatising. All of these people FEEL real, and their segments are each satisfying in their own way, even interlinking at certain points. As a demonstration in acting its a masterclass, with special honours reserved for Phyllida Law as the overbearing, interfering mother from Hell. Probably not a classic, but gratifying enough. And the beautiful white landscape is a star all by itself.. 6/10

sol ***SPOILERS*** Artsy smartzy Igmar Bergman like British film that takes place in the dead of winter in a small Scottish town involving some half dozen persons who live there.There's mother and daughter Elspeth & Frances played by Phylida Law & Emma Thompson, who are mother and daughter in real life, who have trouble communicating with each other. Frances a professional photographer is sick and tired of living in the town since her husband suddenly passed away and is seriously thinking of resettling in far off and warm Australia. There's also Frances' teenage son Alex, Garry Hollywood, who's haunted by his father's ghost and is so into himself and his problems that he doesn't see tomboy Nita, Arlne Cockburn, is crazy about him and wants Alex to be her boyfriend every time he passes her riding his bike by the local bus stop.There's also spinsters Lily & Chloe, Sheila Reid & Sandra Voe, who find solace in their boring lives attending funerals for people that they don't know just to put some meaning and excitement into their lives. And finally there's Tom & Sam, Sean Bggerstaff & Dougas Murphy, who just happen to be playing hooky from school who, Tom that is, ends up meeting Elspeth by the shore and unconsciously brings both her and her estranged daughter Frances back together by having her photograph them. The two boys also find two kittens abandoned in a sea cave to their frozen fate and end up adopting them. Which in fact makes them skipping school worthwhile in saving the kittens lives.***SPOILERS*** By the time the film is over you get the impression that everything was fine between all those involved in it with Elspeth & Frances together again and Alex & Nita now boyfriend and girlfriend. There's also Lily & Chole finally finding, after checking out all the newspapers obituaries, a funeral to attend and someone, the guest of honor, to morn for. The most confusing thing in the movie was what exactly happened to both Tom & Sam together with their kittens? They just seemed to have happily walked off the edge of the earth, into the frozen Arctic Sea, by the time the movie ended?

iluvg33ks Beautiful film, although they never quite tied up the four stories. It was fun to see Emma Thompson and Phyllida Law in the same movie, but it left me a little confused, with the two funeral ladies and Alex and Nita. Other than that, the film was beautifully shot, Alan Rickman has an eye for beautiful scenes, if nothing else the film was picturesque. The setting of Scotland in winter provided a beautiful backdrop, and the final scene with Sean Biggerstaff walking on the ice just was an amazing way to end the movie. Although the plot of the two women who go the funeral confused me, I couldn't quite figure out what they were doing there, besides adding length to the movie, the rest of the movie did mesh together very well. If you're looking for an artistically beautiful film, this is for you.

Fromac1 For his debut as a film director, Alan Rickman has chosen material with which he is very familiar. The Winter Guest is a play he commissioned and directed on the stage before adapting it for the screen in collaboration with playwright Sharman Macdonald. Rickman's familiarity with the material and his considerable experience of working in front of the camera seem to have prepared him well for the making of an exceptional film.Emma Thompson plays Frances, a photographer whose husband has recently died after a long illness, leaving her to raise a teenaged son. Frances and Alex are visited by Elspeth, Frances' mother (played by Thompson's mother, Phyllida Law). Frances cannot find direction in her life and has surrounded herself with the photographic record of her husband and his illness. Elspeth, whose health is failing, cannot rely on the support of a daughter who is unable even to care for herself. Alex is caught between memories of his father and an emotionally absent mother. On the coldest day in memory, the sea around this remote Scottish village, like the lives of Frances and those she loves, has frozen as far as the eye can see.Together, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and production designer Robin Cameron Don, have created an environment for the story which mirrors the desolate emotional world in which the characters find themselves. The colours are muted to the point that the film sometimes seems to have been shot in black and white, with only tones of grey to give it texture. Some shots are composed with a rigid symmetry, others with a sweeping, aerial freedom. This contrast is timed to echo the themes of dependency between parent and child, the purpose of Death and grieving, and the tension between the emotion and the intellect.Rickman uses cinematic devices like a veteran. His symbols and recurring motifs of water, fire, and even fur, are used to considerable effect throughout. So too, does he use narrative techniques. Two truant school boys, not originally connected with Frances and her mother, are drawn into their story and used as contrast. In their narcissistic search for pleasure and adventure, they depict the base side of life against Frances' cold intellectual remoteness. Nita, a young woman with romantic designs on Alex, is almost able to draw him out with her passionate attitudes and her aggressive, juvenile, almost animalistic desires. Chloe and Lily, two elderly women of the village whom we meet as they wait for a bus to take them to a funeral, demonstrate the constant presence of death and how it can be embraced and normalised. They pore over obituaries and discuss the rituals of death with a mundane, child-like preoccupation. Their closeness further develops the themes of dependency and need.Some may find the restraint of the film difficult to endure. Characters seem ever on the edge of lashing out or breaking down. There is a contained energy at work which is only seldom evident in their actions. This restraint is deliberate. It becomes the central motif in the film's construction. The story is about the frictions which exist between what we need and what we can give, between parent and child, between passion and logic, life and death. The performances are tight and restrained because the characters, in their efforts to understand and adapt, must be also.The Winter Guest is an excellent film. Rickman uses visual, auditory and narrative techniques like a veteran. There are tremendous performances by all; especially Law (Elspeth) , Arlene Cockburn (Nita) and Sean Biggerstaff (Tom). A wonderful capture of atmosphere and production design is enhanced by exemplary cinematography and held together by an intelligent, controlled and dramatically charged script.