Diagonaldi Very well executed

SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

MoPoshy Absolutely brilliant

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

inioi Wim Wenders did an excellent job with this movie.The only possible difference with the old classics is that the film is filmed in colour. The sets recreates amazingly the atmosphere of the real film noir. The story and the acting works on the same good level, and special mention to th excellent music score of John Barry.I would like to highlight the fact of the movie also shows the personal life of Hammett: his humble apartment, his neighborhood, his alcohol problems, his girlfriend....which makes the story believable.Not just for film noir lovers, but for people who loves cinema in general.

gavin6942 The novel writer Dashiell Hammett is involved in the investigation of the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful Chinese cabaret actress in San Francisco.Who would have thought that Wim Wenders had in him one of the all-time great American detective films? Not me, that's for sure. And yet, here it is with some great characters and plenty of those intriguing twists and turns we love. And Peter Boyle! The setting of San Francisco as opposed to New York or Los Angeles (or Chicago) was a good choice, and of course allows for the Chinatown subplot. Surprisingly, this does not seem to be a common plot element in detective films (besides, of course, "Chinatown").

Martin Teller A fictionalized account of Dashiell Hammett getting involved in a scenario like something from one of his own stories. Wim Wenders constructs a neo-noir that's light on the "neo". No post-modern winks at the audience, no updating the sex and violence to the modern standards. Except for the color photography, one utterance of "shit" and slightly more sexual suggestion than you could get away with the time, it feels like something straight out of the era. The snappy dialogue, the canted angles, the rough and tumble characters, the twisty plot (more Chandler than Hammett, really, but whatever). The blatantly artificial sets are perhaps a little too self-conscious but it doesn't ever get too kitschy. Terrific score and very appropriate casting including Freddie Forrest, Peter Boyle, Marilu Henner and Elisha Cook. The biggest problem is that the film doesn't have a great storyline to hang its fedora on. It's pretty much just an exercise in pure duplication. But it's a fun time for lovers of the genre.

chaos-rampant I didn't really expect my first forray into Wenders to be a fictionalized pulpy detective story homage to the patriarch of pulpy detective stories, writer Dashiell Hammett, produced by Coppola's Zoetrope Studios, but there you have it. Strangely, I'm not even sure this is a Wenders film in anything but name, as Coppola himself allegedly had to reshoot one and a half years after Wenders wrapped shooting significant portions of a film his backers found very 'dissatisfying'. Par the course for a film that had to undergo so much revamping to please money men, Hammett is a mess, albeit an interesting mess.If the premise sounds good enough, pulpy writer Dashiell Hammett being drawn one last time into his detective past as a favour to a former Pinkerton colleague whom he helps investigate the disappearance of an underage Chinese prostitute, the script never quite fulfills its potential. Not because it's sprawling and convoluted (the best noirs usually are), but because it's just that for all the wrong reasons, and on top of that half-baked and unconvincing. At times it plays almost like a Dick Tracy caricature of noir plots.Most interesting thing about it however are the meta- aspects of the story, probably what drew Wenders into the fold (apart from his fascination with American genre cinema). Writer Hammett playing detective Hammett, the lines between reality and fiction blurring dangerously as he does. But the film never runs with it, as though afraid it might alienate a mainstream audience that likely had little vested interest in such a film to begin with.The opening sequence shows what might have been: having just finished his latest novel, Hammett lies down playing out the ending in his head; after a violent coughing fit, he staggers back into his living room only to find waiting for him the hero of his book. Is Hammett hallucinating in the grip of alcohol and tuberculosis or does he base his fictional characters on people he knows? The ending tries to bring all that back full circle but it's too little too late. The movie has dawdled a little too much in squeaky clean Zoetrope sets trying to pass for 1920's San Francisco, has tripped over the needlessly convoluted mess it creates for its characters. It's still a fun watch, the cast is populated by familiar faces (three Twin Peaks actors, Sam Fuller, Elisha Cook Jr.), and Frederic Forrest gives a good show. Interesting curio, not much else, Hammett fans will probably dig it significantly more than me.