AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

abitrowdy What is it with screen writers and their slavish hunger for a twist ending? This movie had potential, poorly realized, but promising enough for me to stick with it until the end. Then it fell completely apart, so that they could have a twist at the end.Spoiler Alert - Apparently it is okay to pick out a complete stranger and set him up to be murdered, because, golly, he might accidentally turn out to be the actual bad guy anyway. See? That makes it okay. Oh goody, our two would-be, cold-blooded murderers can go off to live happily ever after, after all.All in all, not much about not much. Barely tolerable, with a complete let down at the end.

Desertman84 A Crime is a thriller starring Norman Reedus, Emmanuelle Béart and Harvey Keitel.The screenplay is about the devastated life of a man haunted by the unsolved murder of his beloved wife and is strangely complicated by the mysterious neighbor who loves him from afar.The film was directed by Manuel Pradal.Vincent's (Reedus) wife has suffered a most brutal fate, and these days the once happy New Yorker is but a frozen shell of his former self.He is not a man unloved, however, because although he may currently be unaware of her feelings for him, his neighbor Alice (Béart) knows in her heart that she and Vincent were meant to be together. All that needs to happen to make Vincent recognize her love is for the grieving widower to finally be liberated from his tragic past; and she is willing to go to any lengths necessary in order to make this happen. If he was finally to find the man responsible for his wife's death, he could finally be free to open his heart to her.When she hails a cab driven by lonely New York soul,Roger (Keitel), the gears of the scheming woman's elaborate plan are slowly set into motion despite the ignorance of both the naive cab driver, and the somber object of her delusional affections. The performance of the cast particularly Harvey Keitel save this pointless movie and poorly written screenplay.But still,it never fails to entertain and provide some unusual twists that makes it a decent thriller.In the end,you probably neither care about the events,the twists nor the characters in the movie.

MBunge Yes, Harvey Keitel is in this. Yes, he gets naked.Yes, Emmanuelle Beart is in this. Yes, she gets naked.Yes, this is a European production of an American crime drama. Yes, it sucks.A Crime attempts to weld together a U-S style psychological thriller, complete with a couple of "big" twists that anyone can see coming, with a existentialist examination of love and obsession right out of French cinema. Maybe that's not such a bad idea but this movie is the worst of all possible worlds. It's as boring and pretentious as any art house Euro flick while also being as vacuous and preposterous as any other piece of crap that gets cobbled together in the States. As a general rule, I try to watch a movie straight through no matter how bad it is. It's the best way to capture the full effect and it's only fair to the folks who made it. Every so often, though, I run into a motion picture where I can't stand it. I have to stop the film at some point, get up out of my chair and shake off the despair and ennui. A Crime is one of those movies.Vincent Harris (Norman Reedus) is a man whose wife was murdered 3 years ago and the only lead is the taxi he saw leaving their home, a gash in the side and the driver wearing a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Now, Vincent lives in a Brooklyn apartment and races his pet greyhound that never wins. Alice Parker (Emmanuelle Beart) is Vincent's neighbor, a frequent drunk who's desperately in love with him. Or at least some desperate approximation of what she thinks love is. Vincent is fixated on finding his wife's killer. We know that because Alice and a police detective (Joe Grifasi) specifically describe Vincent in those terms. For his part, Vincent doesn't do anything to justify that description until the film is almost halfway over and then he doesn't appear to be fixated. He acts like he's utterly off his rocker, but I guess the filmmakers realized they had to do something to demonstrate Vincent's alleged obsession or the 2nd half of the movie would make no sense at all.Convinced that Vincent will never be her's until he locates his wife's murderer, Alice heads out and seduces a cabbie named Roger Culkin (Harvey Keitel). She beds him, gets him to fall off the AA wagon, puts a gash in the side of his cab and has him don a red jacket and a big, shiny ring. Then she pushes Roger and Vincent together and…bingo!So, to sum up, at this point in A Crime, we've got a pathetic wretch who manipulates a crazy guy into killing another guy who has a headband and a boomerang. Oh, yeah. I forgot that Roger Culkin has a headband and a boomerang. It wouldn't normally be a big deal but those two things pretty much define his entire character.It turns out that Alice's scheme works and she and Vincent wind up in each other's arms. Then Roger resurfaces and although I sorely hoped that he was a ghost or Alice's hallucination, he's real and his brush with death turned him into some sort of taxi cab supercriminal who exists outside the law. He demands Alice run away with him or he'll turn Vincent in as an attempted murderer. But then it turns out that Roger was the guy who killed Vincent's wife after all and Alice slays him after Roger suddenly turns into the dumbest man alive. Vincent and Alice reunite, only for Vincent to discover what Alice had done, and they both lived happily ever after. Or at least that's what I got out of the ending.There's a frickin' cornucopia of things wrong with A Crime. It's slow. It has no energy or rhythm. Vincent and Alice are barely two dimensional. It's too long. Both of the twists involving Roger can be seen coming a mile away. It's too quiet. The success of Alice's scheme is so improbable that I at first thought it was evidence that the film's POV had shifted to her delusional perspective. Too much time is spent on Alice and Roger's contrived bar conversations. A headband and a boomerang!What A Crime smells like is some arrogant Euro effort to class up an American genre flick that founders on a poor grasp of genre mechanics and a lack of interest in any of the characters as human beings. It is dreary and dreadful and if you can view the whole thing in a single sitting, then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. For all us lesser folk, skip this loser.

lhhung_himself It becomes very obvious in the first few minutes that the characters aren't going to behave like real people do and that it's going to be a study of something "deep". I thought, OK this might work - there might be some great truth at the end that justifies the outlandish plot. Nope - like the Lady in the Water - at the end you realise that you really did waste your time.MILD SPOILERS startAnd no I did not miss the "clues" scattered through the film that Keitel may have done the deed. If it was meant to be interpreted that he did then the plot is incredibly stupid. If they were intended to provide some ambiguity so that Beart could rationalize her actions - then that makes more sense but I think it's the former seeing that none of the characters' actions are very believable.MILD SPOILERS endIn summary this is another case of someone having a somewhat clever premise but not being able to decide what to do with it. So aside from some shots of Keitel's kiester and Beart's new assets (they weren't there in Manon des Sources...) there's not much that is interesting to see here.