When great movie-making keeps you glued to the chair

Rating: 9/10 (3 May 2005)

Clint Eastwood shows (once again) with this movie that he is a great director. Everything in this movies - from a cinematic point of view - is excellent: the cinematography is beautiful (the gloomy use of colours like grey, silver, browns and blacks are very suitable for a tragedy), the actors are also excellent at a point that you don't believe that they are performing but actually living the situations - the Oscars to Sean Penn and Tim Robins are well deserved) and of course not enough can be told about Clint Eastwood's direction and music score... simply PERFECT!!! You think that after all this I would rate this movie with 10 but I rate it with 9 due to the story... The story is a modern tragedy reminiscent to ancient Greek tragedies. It is also very good but I believe it lacks somewhere that I actually can not pin-point exactly... It just leaves you with a bit of a bitter after-taste - i.e. it fills your mind with questions of doubt of how this story could actually be real... It is shown to you in a very realistic way through very realistic characters and so you'd expect a very realistic story... Probably I'm not very clear in what I'm trying to say but maybe after seeing it you'll understand what I'm trying to say.