Protraph Lack of good storyline.

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

mark.waltz This is a family reunion I want no part of in this Lifetime TV style my vie, released in theaters, and not welcome to darken my DVD player after this viewing. Sam Shepherd is a troubled western movie actor (they still exist?) who finds out from his aging mother (Eva Marie Saint) that he has a grown son in a small town where he once shot a movie. He ventures there where he finds an equally messed up son (Gabriel Mann) along with the beautiful woman (Jessica Lange) he basically forgot about after finishing up the film. Nice guy, aye? Real all American hero, this one, yet still able to find work, that is when he shows up sober to work. Unpleasant in every way, this is a story we've seen thousands of times, decently acted but soapy and unbelievable. I really didn't care about seeing a reunion between the two, and when it happens, the only one I felt any compassion for is the beautiful Lange. I don't believe that she'd stay single for long here, although with Mann, seeing his harpy mess of a floozy girlfriend would drive me to throw an entire apartment out of a window, too. Yes, people with emotionally empty lives exist, but their stories don't make appealing movies. A scene where Lange has to explain how hash browns are made is an insult to her talent.

tieman64 Wim Wenders collaborated with Sam Shepard two decades ago on "Paris, Texas". That film starred Harry Dean Stanton as Travis, an elderly man who travels from Texas to Los Angeles in the hopes of reconciling with both his estranged son and ex-wife. After failing to atone for his obsessively jealous, violent past, Travis disappears into the desert from which he came."Don't Come Knocking" tells virtually the same tale. Also written by Shepard, it finds Shepard playing an ageing actor who abandons the set of his latest western in order to visit his mother in the small town of Butte, Montana. Once there he attempts to reconcile with his two illegitimate children, and the waitress who gave birth to one. Again bookended by the desert, the film charts a very broad metaphorical journey out of a forlorn Old West - with its preponderance for sex, violent masculinity and philandery - and into the town of Butte. Butte's portrayed as a place in which time stands still, its inhabitants living in the wreckage of Shepard's last visit.The film's different from "Paris, Texas" in minor ways. Shepard's naive and seemingly less guilt-stricken than Travis was in "Texas". Meanwhile, the family he's left behind seem to be coping perfectly fine without him. They're stronger, less vulnerable and far less bitter than their counterparts in "Texas". Indeed, they all eventually forgive and pity Shepard. And while Travis seemed consigned to a life of loneliness, and even death, Shepard's given a quasi heroic ending, waving a cowboy's hat and riding a horse off into the sunset while a film crew looks on. Caccooned in the past, he's less immediately threatening than Travis.These differences are minor, though. For the most part, "Don't Come Knocking" is wholly inferior to "Paris, Texas". Wenders and Shepard admit to making up their script as they went along, don't seem to have any definitive goal in mind, and their film features 2 or 3 silly moments, all of which involve Shepard's son throwing incredulous tantrums. Elsewhere the film trades in clichés, though actresses Sarah Polley and Jessica Lange manage to do special work with their characters. Lange in particular plays her part somewhat unconventionally, her character masking pain with private humour.Despite its problems, "Don't Come Knocking" looks amazing. Virtually every scene is shot with an interesting eye, Wenders lending the film a wonderful sense of mood, space, colour and landscape. The visuals are so strong you almost don't care about the story, which is the case with most of Wenders' best films. Why is this? One must remember that Wenders often travels the world with a Polaroid camera, taking photos of interesting locales, architecture, buildings and landscapes. He then compile these photos into private albums. Often his films then become "excuses" for "filming" these albums. "Don't Come Knocking", for example, was largely made as an excuse to shoot the town of Butte, which Wenders had visited and photographed over a decade earlier. The town strongly reminded him of Edward Hopper, a number of whose paintings Wenders emulates here."Don't Come Knocking" is also heavily influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni, Nicholas Ray and Yasujiro Ozu. Many of these artists Wenders has himself collaborated with. Wenders' 1980 documentary, "Lightning on the Water", for example, was about Ray's last days, 1985's "Tokyo Ga" was a documentary on Ozu, and he collaborated with Antonioni on 1995's "Beyond the Clouds". Significantly, all these artists, as well as Hopper, are typically termed "existential artists" (though the term has perhaps lost all useful meaning). Wenders also labels himself an "existential director", and is generally preoccupied with alienation and questions of self-identity. Occasionally his Christian beliefs influence his films as well.Perhaps no other director has made as many "road movies" as Wenders. He'd even name his production company "Road Movies", and almost always uses the genre as a kind of metaphor for journeys of self discovery or escape. But the way in which Wenders merges European modernism with America genre filmmaking (he's in love with Americana, American culture, music, iconography etc) has rightfully led to much criticism. His is a kind of romanticised alienation, a designer existentialism, overly preoccupied with outer decor and style. You see that with "Don't Come Knocking", its characters and plot an afterthought, whilst its buildings and vistas, shot lovingly in widescreen, like moving odes to Hopper, are the raison d'etre.8/10 – Eye-popping visuals and palatable mood make up for trite script. See Wenders' "Land of Plenty". Worth one viewing.

peter-ramshaw-1 I think you gotta like Win Wnders films to enjoy this. I do and so thought it was okay ... hey, so it's no Paris Texas, that's a given but the style of the film is still pretty unique. Unfortunately I thought the characters were very thinly developed (apert from Jessica Lang's which was impressive) and hence the tension that could have been a major part of the film wasn't there. The rest are an unlikeable bunch (or unknowable). After I got over asking myself how the kid threw that lounge suite out the tiny window and then seeing that somehow the window had magically gotten bigger to try to hide that goof, I didn't mind the odd continuity flaw here and there. Unfortunately for Sam Shppard and Win Wenders, all their stuff is going to be compared to Paris and that's a tough ask. This was a pale imitation but easy enough to sit through if a bit slow in patches.

tedg There aren't many ways to be a screenwriter, ways of delivering a story. There are fewer than the playwright has, though the stories can have more variety and structure. Sam Shepard crossed that line a long time ago. He was lucky at first, because he found a sweet spot where the limits of the portal between the two could have such restrictions that he could write about those restrictions and have them convey as some sort of existential clarity. Since then, he's been more active as a player than a playwright. But in this, he's less an actor than what used to be called a "character actor," meaning there's one type that he is famous for playing, and he just gets plugged in wherever that character is required.It must be extremely depressing to be so limited in your art and know it. The knowing is the hard part and I suppose its easy to see it as a life wasted. So what does someone in this position do? He writes about it. What else is there?So we have a story about an aging character actor who breaks away from acting. He just cannot stand it any more. So he reaches out the family he knows: his mom. And from that he learns of another family, and then a family beyond that. His real-life wife is an actress of some range and ability, someone less intelligent and perhaps as a result more committed and successful. She plays the old, short lived girlfriend he got pregnant during a shoot. Her character, though she is a waitress, is someone successfully in the world and able to cope with loneliness. Sarah Polley is a writer, actress, director who I think has enormous talent, which is a shorthand way of saying that she limits the art rather than the other way around that Shepard has. She plays a third layer of family, a sort of calm anchor, a sort of token of the other extreme from Shepard's character.That's it. That's the structure of this thing. All else are episode that set the fences and paddocks. Its pretty darned effective, if you know what it is, and touching.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.