StunnaKrypto Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

Sexylocher Masterful Movie

Motompa Go in cold, and you're likely to emerge with your blood boiling. This has to be seen to be believed.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

poetcomic1 I watched this on a whim the first time and was really pleased. But its only after some years of going back to it that I realize just how powerful and effective this little gem is. The key to the film is that it is an ACTOR'S film. Each scene is indeed ONE long take without a cut! All the main actors in this have done serious stage work and this made them fall back on their best stage acting skills with intense rehearsal and complex stage-like maneuvers. Bravo to them all.It is made for the actors, it exists entirely through the actors and WHAT ACTORS! The 'Supermarket Scene' with Robin Penn Wright is SO real it is almost physically painful to watch it. Glenn Close is flawless in her tightly controlled heart-breaking vignette, Lisa Gay Hamilton is mysterious and terrifying as a victim of abuse and boldly goes way over the top with her acting - but as a carefully considered choice.Director Garcia is not some effete Sundance flash in the pan - he has paid his dues on TV, doing commercials, all kind of work. He knows the medium and knows how to get what he wants. But also, he is a man more than a little imbued with the magical realism of his father the great novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.Yes, this is one of those movies that tell me if you are 'my kind of person'. I have a hard time relating to those who find this 'a bore'. I actually feel sorry for those who cannot receive what this film has to offer.

TxMike This is a simple movie, probably very low budget, but it is filled with established actors. It features nine different women, and their lives. Each of the nine segments is one take, of about 11 to 13 minutes long. Some of the characters appear in two different segments, in connections which are very indirect.And that is what the "movie" is all about. It plays on the concept that we are all connected, humanity, there is a certain "continuity" there.A woman is in the Los Angeles jail, we learn that it isn't the first time, but the first one was a "mistake." Meaning this second one was deliberate.A middle aged woman (Sissy Spacek) has a partially disabled husband, and a sweet, intelligent high school daughter. She is about to have an affair at a cheap motel when she realizes what her life is really all about.A woman is struggling with her impending surgery for breast cancer. She is not being a very good patient, but her husband remains at her side.It is these kinds of stories told in this small movie, just nice to watch and consider.

ghigau Some of the effectiveness of this film comes from the camera taking a single shot for the entire segment. The camera follows the main character, occasionally panning to persons or sets to give context. It left me curious as to how many takes were required to get the vignette just right. The actors had to know their lines to get from beginning to end, something of a rarity these days except on-stage.Every segment was believable, if occasionally over-wrought; that is, the viewer could agree with the writer/director that someone would act a particular way, but it was not always the most obvious way to act. As with many films, the plot line was often more about persons acting from their impulse rather than acting from their reason. Most of life is not that way, Sarah Palin excepted, but it IS that way for some, and I suppose that makes their lives more interesting than the lives of the folks that live logically. Film makers choose, fortunately, the interesting and sometimes thought-provoking story line over the banal.

Roland E. Zwick Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives" raises the question of just how emotionally invested a viewer can become in a character who appears on screen for no more than ten or a dozen minutes throughout the course of a movie. And what happens if ALL the main characters show up for that little a time? For this is the case with "Nine Lives," a compilation of vignettes about nine virtually unconnected ladies, each of whom is struggling with issues common to women in a modern world. Some are coping with messy relationships, others with regrets about past actions, still others with health issues and the looming possibility of death. Even though the stories abut slightly on one another from time to time, each exists essentially as a stand-alone sketch able to function without the others.The main problem with a movie like "Nine Lives" is that, for all the insights it offers into life and human relationships (and they are many), it simply can't develop its characters to any appreciable extent in the time it has allotted them. Just as we are becoming engaged by a particular woman and her situation, the movie shuts us down by cutting away to the next segment. This is really no criticism of the movie per se - which is a well written, well acted and well directed piece of lyrical film-making - but the structure dilutes our interest and robs the film of the cumulative force it might have had were the individual stories fleshed out to feature length.Still, given the limitations, this is a film filled with flavorful moments and fine performances from a large and gifted cast that includes Sissy Spacek, Mary Kay Place, Glenn Close, Dakota Fanning, Holly Hunter, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Robin Wright Penn, Joe Mantegna and Aiden Quinn, among many others. And the final moments are so tender, poignant and touching that they carry the film to a level where it transcends artifice and makes a genuine human connection with its audience. Thus, despite the reservations one might have about the film as a whole, the parts are more than compelling enough to make it well worth watching.