Powerful

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Best movie of this year hands down!

Blistering performances.

What a diasappointing film. Beginners has a lot going for it; its a comedy, highly rated and features an oscar winning performance. However, the film itself is notfunny at all. The only jokes are repeated many times - the childish voices and giving the dog subtitles. These jokes didnt make me smile even once and by the end they were just very annoying. The actors are also very disappointing and none of their characters are very memorable, inuding oscar winning Christopher Plummer. He is undeserving of the award and is defnitealy the weakest performance from any supporting winner I have seen. Perhaps Michael Sheen for Midnight in Paris or Kenneth Brannagh for My Week with Marilyn would be more deserving winners. The direction is very difficult to understand. There are regular montage shots during the film that seem to mostly feature US presidents. The introduction to Christopher Plummer is also a collection of about twenty shots of him in different outfits talking to the camera. Neither of these techniques are neccessary and instead they just confuse the viewer.All in all, a poor film. Not worth seeing for any reason.

The review title's about all I wanted to say, except this is definitely a film that needs two separate ratings, one aggregating the love, the other the hate. If you're not someone who likes to take it slow, you're going to hate it. For those of us who like slow, it couldn't be much better.

The first fifteen or so minutes of Beginners was full of such sweet promise that I couldn't wait to tuck into the rest of the movie. Ewan McGregor and Melanie Laurent have beautiful chemistry and the performances are even more beautiful because Melanie Laurent's character has laryngitis and she communicates only with her eyes, smile and notepad. The little dog, Arthur, is a delight whenever he's on screen, and he has huge chemistry with his owner. There's a few incredibly well written lines, especially Mills' decision to place dialogue captions over Arthur's piercing eye contact. Christopher Plummer has a very showy part as a life-loving, cancer-stricken, openly gay old man. That, and the fact that 82 year old Plummer had only chalked up a single nomination in his career, are the reasons he won the Oscar in 2011. That's not to say that Plummer isn't good, because he does a good job, but compared to performances like Jonah Hill (Moneyball) as well as unnominated work by Ryan Philippe (The Lincoln Lawyer), Stellan Skarsgard (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and half the cast of Midnight in Paris, Plummer comes up short. His performance in Danny Collins is far superior in every way.This film had no business being 105 minutes long. Some things that are sweet at first become grating. Even Melanie Laurent can't keep me engrossed in the film as she and McGregor go through their inevitable love story. The editing of the film does much to create confusion. I don't know why this film is set in 2003, but for a viewer the timeline jumping can be confusing if we don't know that 2003 is the film's present day. Beginners serves as a reminder than Melanie Laurent is a treasure who should be in more movies, but little else.

People in the future will look back on films like this that rate so well and think, "what the hell did people like about that?". It is mediocre, trivial, slight and these days almost a self-parody of the artsy type of movie with the plinky-plonky music and the scenes where everything is so subtle it forgets to actually happen.I like interesting stories. This is just a story. And I mean "just".The characters aren't all that interesting and what they are doing and feeling is not all that interesting either. This kind of cinema seems to want to tap into what it's like to be a human and to have complicated feelings and mixed up memories and it's just not very profound or special or enlightening and it definitely isn't very entertaining.Perhaps to like this kind of film depends on where you are with your own perceptions of the world or perhaps you just like having what you yourself feel, affirmed on screen and you see that as something that makes a film great, but I personally don't. I want some excitement, some interest, something I wasn't expecting, something to make me think or really feel, something profound or even something alien and unusual or eccentric, bombastic or beautiful. But this? This is pedestrian, lethargic, sometimes painful and ultimately just dull. Dull, normal, people with nothing really going on, just like nearly everyone you know. I don't want to go to the cinema to see or feel this. This is just life. I get it. I know it already. Give me some escapism please or at least some characters or a story better than this.