Beautiful, moving film.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A wonderful movie, uplifting and an inspiring human journey. Great photography lovely scenery and some not so lovely views of India. Fabulous and engrossing. A story of a couple looking to adopt a child from India and trying to find themselves. Joel Edgerton is wonderful as the person with "history" trying to fix up himself and his marriage with a child and he is hoping his wife will change once there is three of them. She is hoping to give him everything he wants to keep them together. Radha is wonderful as the person on the edge of everything. Just my kind of movie. I love a love story. I also liked Japanese Story, The Way Way Back, Secret Men's Business, and Walkabout. I hated No Country for Old Men (Senseless violence) and Burn before Reading (LSD dreams as a movie complete with paranoia).

This is one of those films I found in Netflix and watched knowing nothing about it. Well, sometimes you score! What a surprise: this is a great film. It works on so many levels. The way that the personal story of this couple is woven in with the affect on them of Calcutta is awesome. It's about a couple from Australia who go to India to receive the baby girl they've been waiting two years to adopt. Once they get there, naturally, there are all kinds of bureaucratic delays. So there they are in Calcutta with time to kill. The visuals of Calcutta as Fiona and her husband experience the city and its people are incredible: vivid, graphic and real. I got such a sense of the culture; it was fascinating to watch the impact it had, especially on Fiona, who, as a Type A atheist lawyer, despite her beliefs, or lack thereof, winds up receiving the spiritual energy of the city and country. The acting is also excellent, which, as always, intensifies the experience of the film. I highly recommend The Waiting City for anyone who wants to watch something different, original,visually stunning, and emotionally gripping.

I wanted to enjoy this film. On paper, it had everything going for it. Australian couple looking to adopt a young girl from India and their trials and tribulations in Calcutta as they wait for the final bureaucracy to clear.But sadly, it did not quite gel. For one, it was too long. At almost 2 hours, the pace, which hardly frantic, dragged at times. There was little chemistry between the two leads. And even though very different (she a lawyer, he a once-successful muso), their relationship wasn't wholly convincing - a crucial aspect of the film considering they are on screen together for much of the film.

Diane and I watched this moving, intelligent and subtle film this afternoon in Fremantle and both of us had nearly the same feelings about what we had just seen. I believe Waiting City was one of the few, if not the only, film made completely out of Australia; the visuals of the city of Kolcata (Calcutta) are stunning and are a significant aspect of the movie that we saw. Without going into details of the script, I thought that an important part of the film was the subtle breaks in information given the viewer through the progression of the film; as viewers we are not fed every bit of information about the plot of the film. There are certain characters and certain incidents that either end with no reference to them any more in the script or certain characters that appear and then are gone with no further reference to them ever having been there in the first place. This is not to say that, at least for me, this aspect of the filming is disturbing or somehow negative, it is just curious and for me adds to the subtle mysteriousness of the film.India plays a central role in the film; its population and crowding are almost suffocating and the obvious run-down vision of the city where the action takes place is striking for someone living in a Western city where everything is quickly repaired as soon as paint fades or tiles crack.On the political side of the film, it can be no accident that the central drama of the movie revolves around the city of Bhopal where the world's worst industrial accident occurred in 1984 in a plant owned and operated by the American company Union Carbide. As the script develops, the viewer will see the logic of the inclusion of that tragic city in the film. There is not the slightest mention of what happened there in '84 but the chemical nature of that disaster leads inexorably to conclusions by the viewer.