Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

Quiet Muffin This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Cheryl A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

writers_reign Were I to go along with the analysis/theorising surrounding this title both in the reviews themselves and the more than usual comments in the discussion section I may well remind myself that it was directed by Louis Malle who had already made a film centred on incest rather than one in which incest is merely a factor. Arguably the earlier film was more personal to Malle involving as it did mother and son in the here and now rather than siblings several years in the past. Not having read the novel on which Damage is based I have no idea how large the incest factor featured but the fact that Malle read it and optioned it virtually on publication - the film itself was released within a couple of years of publication - may be pertinent. Judging it just on its merits as a film it is well written, photographed, directed and acted and on balance more art house than multiplex.

Rockwell_Cronenberg In Damage, Louis Malle takes the standard tale of infidelity and plays it in a more unique way than we've seen before. That is to say, he keeps all of the emotions bottled up and close to the chest. Adapted by David Hare, from a novel by Josephine Hart, it tells the story of a Parliament member (Jeremy Irons) who falls deeply in love with his son's fiancée (Juliette Binoche) and carries on an affair with her. The set up is standard, but the approach is what sets this apart. A few years earlier, Adrian Lyne brought us the intense and high-drama extreme of infidelity Fatal Attraction, and here Malle brings us the opposition. It's all stolen glances, closeted emotions and passion that comes out only in the bedroom.For the longest time it seemed like it wasn't doing much new, but the rigidness of it all is such a great contrast to the passion in the sexual scenes. Those scenes felt dangerous, erotic and exciting, while the rest of it was appropriately closeted as a result. Irons slipped into the skin of his character so well, making you see him as this guy who had been so passionless his whole life but finally found something worth feeling for. It's a hauntingly apt portrayal of sexual obsession. The first meeting between Irons and Binoche is brilliantly executed; in the first touch between them you can see in him that this is something that has changed his life completely. It's all very close to the chest and the way Malle constructs it is so brilliantly understated, which I felt added even more emotional pull to it.A lot of people could complain about the characters being thin, but I felt that they couldn't have been any more detailed; it's all there if you're looking closely. In their conversations, their looks, they reveal all of the things that don't come out on the surface. This is the kind of film that doesn't waste a word. Juliette Binoche was incredible, playing something quite unique than what I've come to expect from her, almost an antagonist in a lot of ways. Binoche has made a career out of portraying more on the inside than she displays on the outside, and this is taking that skill of her's to an extreme. Her character is haunted by her past, motivated by so much but revealing so little. It's that mystery that makes her so compelling, so frightening yet simultaneously alluring.The final act raises things to an even more impressive, disturbing level. Miranda Richardson has a big scene near the end that is sure to resonate with any viewer. It's hard to think of many scenes that were as hard to watch as that one. There's so much hate, anguish and devastation in her. She took that character to such an emotional extreme, yet somehow was able to keep it from feeling even slightly melodramatic. It all boils down to a conclusion that is devastating, powerful and absolutely haunting, aided by an operatic score.

chaos-rampant Take overwrought Oedipal stuff about a British minister sleeping with his son's fiancé, and subdue to a cold eroticism that holds no satisfaction in the sweat-soaked bedspreads. Break this up in so many anxieties for each character, past and present, and center around a quest for images that were dear but never quite mourned. The son wishing his disaffected father was passionate, but which we know he is exactly where he shouldn't be; her in turn, accepting to expiate the image that wracked her life with guilt by marrying it. His wife, doubly aghast, who has to mourn about the wrong loved one. So it makes some sense that Louis Malle was drawn to this project. The subtle portraits mirrored against each other in a way that they reveal a larger broken humanity, like in Atlantic City so long ago.But it does remain a film that rests with these images we are seeing, polished again to a certain cold beauty but without a certain nuance to entertain. We are meant to be heavily involved on an emotional basis for this to work, and though decent, haven't we got so many films like this?

Atli Hafsteinsson Damage is by no means an easy film to sit through. It's not your conventional love triangle film, but rather a film about two people who give themselves to each other with no thought to the consequences of what they are doing. Politician Stephen Miller meets his son Martin's new girlfriend, Anna Barton, and almost immediately the two begin an obsessive affair. Of course, this unhealthy attraction can only end badly, and it does.Part of the reason why Damage is so difficult to watch is because the two main characters are so detestable. Stephen is a man who has it all; a loving wife, two children and a career. And he throws it all away for a girl he doesn't even know (they hardly talk, their relationship is all about obsessive lust), whom we know is a damaged soul herself with a dark past. Juliette Binoche crafts the morbid character of Anna well with vacant stares, an androgynous air, yet enough charm so that we at least see what Stephen sees in her. Neither gives any thought to the people around them and what their essentially hollow affair does.About the only character on whose side I was on, and who made the movie worthwhile for me, was Stephen's wife Ingrid, phenomenally played by Miranda Richardson. Towards the end of the movie, she explodes on the screen and wrenches the hearts of the audience. It's easy to see why Miranda Richardson was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role. If you can stomach two destructive, very much unlikeable leads, Richardson's performance makes the ride at least worthwhile.