This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

who could be discovered as embroidery of speculations. or as coherent explanation of an obscure moment of life . but its virtue is the meet between Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffmann. and the atmosphere. and, in same measure, the story who has the gift to be reflection of a period more than reflection of a life. this is the key of film - status of woman, need to escape from pressure, desire to become anonymous, the impossible love who could be a second chance and the drops of great literature from Emma Bovary to Anna Karenina. a beautiful film and impressive performances. and the flavor of a lost time. using the figure of Agatha Christie as pretext.

Wonderfully clever, and extremely well acted by Dustin Hoffman, Vanessa Redgrave. It's the imaginary tale of what happened during a real-life never explained 11 day disappearance of mystery writer Agatha Christie. Hoffman and Redgrave make a wonderful, quirky pair of almost lovers. Fun, smart, and quite touching, with gorgeous photography by Vittorio Stoaro.Finally available on DVD as part of the WB made to order line. So it's pricey, with no extras, and burned to DVD-R, so it may likely last less long than a regular DVD. Still, it's a terrific film, well worth picking up.

I am not normally a great fan of films which offer a purported solution to a real-life mystery. I found David Fincher's recent "Zodiac", about a real-life serial killer who terrorised San Francisco during the sixties and seventies, dull, and did not like the way in which it reversed the presumption of innocence by proclaiming that the killer was a real (although conveniently dead) individual who was suspected of the crimes but never put on trial. Then we have all those attempts to answer old chestnuts like "Who was Jack the Ripper?" and "What is the truth about the assassination of President Kennedy?", films which are generally longer on speculation than on fact and which rarely shed much light on the mysteries in question."Agatha" is another film of this type. It revolves around the disappearance of novelist Agatha Christie for eleven days in December 1926; she disappeared from her Berkshire home and was later found staying under an assumed name in a hotel in the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. The affair gave rise to a frenzy of media speculation at the time, and Christie never said what she had been doing during those eleven days or offered an explanation for her disappearance. The fictitious explanation offered by the film is that Christie, who had just discovered that her husband Archibald was having an affair, went to Harrogate in order to commit suicide but was prevented from doing so by Wally Stanton, a (presumably) fictitious American journalist who befriended her.The best thing about the film is its lavish recreation of 1920s Britain, but I found it had little else to offer. Neither of its stars, Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, seem to be stretched by their material. What surprises me is why the producers should have felt that this particular story was worthy of being made into a film. As a romance? There is some mild flirtation between Agatha and Wally, but this is kept very low-key. As a thriller? Hardly. When the film was shown in cinemas in 1979 Agatha Christie had died only three years earlier at the age of eighty-five. Most of the audience, therefore, would have been well aware that, whatever might have happened to her in Harrogate, she had not come to any serious harm, and there would consequently have been little suspense.The question the film raises is not so much "What happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" but rather "Does anyone still care what happened to Agatha Christie in 1926?" At least the Ripper murders and the Kennedy assassination, to judge by the multitude of books and websites devoted to them, still arouse plenty of controversy today. There is no such interest in the Christie disappearance, which was in all likelihood the result of emotional stress consequent upon the breakdown of her marriage. This film is not so much a puzzle without a solution as a solution without a puzzle. 4/10

I waited a long time to see Agatha. I remember seeing posters for this film at movie theaters when I was a kid and was intrigued about it ever since. For some reason I never happen to catch it, well, until now. I finally watched it on VHS (it's not available on DVD as of this writing). What a letdown. I said "That's it?" when the credits rolled at the end. I couldn't believe what a little, insignificant film it turned out to be. There are great things in it: the cast, lead by the magnificent Vanessa Redgrave. There's also Timothy Dalton and Dustin Hoffman. I always wondered how were they able to cast Hoffman, who's very short, against Vanessa, who's 6 feet tall I believe. Well, I know now: awkwardly. The cinematography by the great Vittorio Storaro is simply stunning and the music is excellent. But the story leaves a lot to be desired because, well, there's really no story.It's just an idea and a haphazardly conceived idea: after Agatha's husband told her he wants a divorce, the depressed mystery writer disappears from the public eye but goes to a health spa under another name and becomes obsessed with a device at the spa she wants to turn into an electric chair, and devises a plot in order for her to die from that electric chair but without making it look like it was a suicide. That's it. So according to this film, Agatha wanted to kill herself without making it look like a suicide but she obviously failed to do so as she was still alive and kicking after reemerging from her short-lived disappearance. Hoffman is the American who flirts with Agatha and eventually becomes part of the flimsy story.If I had known the story was this simple, I probably wouldn't have bothered with it. The production is grade A through and through but the screenplay is pure hokum.