Chinatown

Rating: 8/10 (25 August 2007)

Roman Polanski  I know he is a great director, but I have only seen a couple of his films, and thus wanted to see this, which is rated highly by many critics.
Chinatown is a story of a private detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) who is dupely involved in a case of wife Evelyn Cross (Faye Dunaway) cheating, that leads to his investigating a murder and exposing the bitter truth of today's politics, land grabbing and greed of money  by people who are rich like Noah Cross (John Huston)  father or Evelyn Cross. There is a mysterious turn of events with a parallel story and sub-plot around the murder involving affairs and relationship.
Roman Polanski has done a marvelous job. He controls the director's medium. There are not many notes in the movie that I would consider as off-note, except a few  the most striking the love scene between the detective Jake and the lead lady Evelyn. But apart from that the movie is fabulous. It has an excellent story and screenplay written by Robert Towne.
Jack Nicholson is great in his skills and does give a confidence, style, insightful, and daring image of Jake Gittes. So has Fane Dunaway as daughter, wife and mother and John Huston as rich, wealthy, mean and corrupt father have done marvelous jobs.
The musical score of the movie is punctuated at finer parts of the film bringing more mystery and drama in the narrative. I loved the camera angles  and it reminded so much of Akira Kurosawa's canvass  that covers all background with aesthetic placement of characters forming a pleasing painting on the screen. Roman has a very keen eye on every department of the movie and that fact comes out loud and clear.
The sad ending is a typical Roman's touch to his trademark films.
I loved it and would highly recommend to others to see it at least once.
(Stars 8 out of 10)