Good, but certainly not a masterpiece

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2006)

If you look at the graph of voting on this movie, the greatest number of voters give "Match Point" at 10, which seems to me ridiculous. The movie has any number of flaws: a few awkward bits of dialogue, excessive length, and a premise which is sufficiently tired.
The casting is perfect, a number of individual scenes are masterfully directed, and the play of characters and situations is really quite deft. You don't leave the movie thinking about your OWN life (ugh!), but rather reconsidering and debating the options, motives, and mistakes of the characters. Which is to say, it is a fairly believable, adult film.
Maybe in this day and age, that is enough to make a movie seem like an all-time masterpiece, so let me say, compared to any number of films which came out in the past four years, this certainly is a "10," and in that case I'm not sure of the criteria on which one rates these things.