Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

stantims2 This is an average. The story was entertaining and 7 stars, but the preposterousness of the premise and major oversights is 3 stars. Supposedly, Foos is a voyeur. He may have peeped on some people, but the story doesn't hold water. He has all kinds of notes, but no photos? Do we really think that he'd spend all this time in endless hours of boring spectating and not film or photo the highlights? I think these were his fantasies, perhaps when people checked in. Do we really think this guy could move around in the rafters and not ever be heard? Also, looking at this dump of a hotel, do we really think that there were 3000 visitors in a year. This 21-room place would be 50% full every night for that to occur. The math, to me, doesn't add up. He could be a complete crackpot. Or, a lonely old man. His reactions to the phone call "threat" and being exposed as having money, were equally preposterous. Does this rational-talking person really think that this wouldn't happen, as he bragged about all his "exploits"? What is more amazing is that if he even did this, wouldn't at least some of the many thousands of people who stayed at this hotel over the years confront him, of not do worse? It's hard to believe that any of it happened. Talese is no better. He may have written articles and he may have written books, but you could not, in all fairness, call him an investigative journalist. He never asked even the most obvious questions. Where on earth did Foos get the money to buy his collection? Why does Foos think a given baseball card is worth $X. Was it appraised? If he's so rich, why does he need a book written about him (because he does get a cut of the proceeds) and why does he say that he needs to get paid to talk to anyone? If he's not going to live that long, and has no friends and has no heirs, why does he even have the collection to begin with? How can Talese not have checked the tax records and other public information about the motel? I believe that either Talese never wanted to know the truth, he now delusional or has lost his way in a desperate attempt to get attention again in his career. He just wanted to write something sensational. For all we know, the people that he "voyeured" with Foos were hired by Foos as actors. It is puzzling that after he learns that he's been duped and goes on a tirade and discredits his book. Then, later, rationalizes that it was okay that the hotel was owned by someone else and that the fact that he got confirmation from the named former owner, that he had access, so now it's okay that Foos, again lied. Maybe the publisher was going to sue him, and Talese was advised by counsel to switch his position post-haste.

duvernetphotography We learn how a New York reporter tries to cover for a severe professional blunder. The movie tracks a voyeur, who watches people in hotel rooms for decades. From his hiding spot where he spent hours each night staring at people through a hole in the ceiling. The reporter and the voyeur can't get enough of the limelight. They thrive on the notoriety. When it goes sour, when the voyeur's errors in fact come out, our hero reporter spends the rest of the movie covering for himself. From the start, the voyeur is being filmed in intimate detail and clearly enjoying the attention. He wants us to feel him as a victim in this experience. When all is said and done, their isn't much of a story. The film benefits from great production and editing. It would have been much better had the film used the French cinema reality style with a narrator in monotone third person. This film is depressing. The take away is that the more someone proclaims their integrity and honesty, the less likely it is to be true.

EdD5 This is like a couple hacks watched The Thin Blue Line and then set out to recreate its weight and nuance but lacking both skill and a compelling subject. It tells the largely non-story of author Gay Talese's effort to immortalize a motel peeping tom. Talese's "insights" into his protagonist seem as manufactured and tenuous as the protagonist's credibility and the film indulges rather than subverts the two blustering egotists it presents. Talese lives in a home ornamented with pictures of himself, while his counterpart has a basement full of "treasures" he boasts are worth millions. Talese's books repeatedly and laughably litter the background of many shots, including one at the home of "the voyeur" where the author just happens to be sitting in an easy chair with an older volume framed nearly touching him. The revelation near the end of the subject's duplicity to the author involves something which any high school kid would have checked before writing a story for his school paper, but neither Talese nor his vaunted fact checkers seem to have bothered. The only real subject here is two old men struggling to burnish their lives with some added relevance as the sun sets. If that alone were worthy of a film, it would have taken a filmmaker with deeper skills and more original ideas.

alice-enland Sometimes we're better off not looking behind the curtain, or behind the ceiling vent. About halfway into Voyeur I realized I was watching a sequel. A sequel to The Odd Couple. Gerald Foos was a passable Walter Matthau and Gay Talese was as good as gold as Jack Lemmon. I kept waiting for Gay to go shopping for produce so he could tell a woman how to select a cantaloupe. This is a documentary for our times. In an era when national news organizations routinely present fake news dressed up as real news here comes a movie about fakery. The tension builds. Will Foos be able to put one over on Gay Talese, the internationally famous author whose clothes closet rivals Cher's? But damn, the man can dress. Talese is more layered than an old time burlesque queen at the start of her act.We wonder, is he really being fooled by . . . a man named Foos? Can this be real? Foos claimed he spent hours upon hours, years upon years sweating and freezing in the attic of his no-tel motel in Aurora, Colorado, viewing the sex acts of strangers and jerking off 3-5 times a night. Lucky for him he kept meticulous notes and lent an air of authenticity to his story by writing to Talese way back in 1980.I think the wrong story is marketed here. To me it wasn't about Foos and his sickness, instead it's a fascinating story about a famous writer at the end of his career, wondering if he wasn't tanking his entire reputation over a weird story from a weird guy. Even someone as talented as Gay Talese, and he is talented, is human in the end and has fears. As mismatched as they were I felt that Talese came to like Foos and moreso Foos's wife. True, maybe Talese thought of them as zoo animals who he couldn't stop looking at or maybe as strangers having sex. But there was never a second when I thought Talese looked down on them or regarded them as lesser human beings.