Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

rkhen The Claim is a story fans of Dickens will recognise. No spoilers here, but the wind-up packs a classic one-two punch moral of the sort 19th century literature made famous. Given the period setting, it works very well. The Old Testament flavour (in a story set in a town literally named Kingdom Come) is also blatant and well-written. In a nutshell: you got Paint Your Wagon, minus the song and dance, plus meaningful commentary and careful attention to detail. As a historically-accurate, painstakingly-filmed New Western, this movie deserves to be shelved alongside such other outstanding titles as Jeremiah Johnson, Little Big Man, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. If you liked those, see this. (PS: Some reviewers are mad because the story is slow, grey, bleak, and understated, with little "action". That's also a fair description of the Old West. When you're done watching The Claim, you've been there.)

TheLittleSongbird A very good film, one that is not easy to get into initially but is very rewarding once you stick with it. The Claim does take its time to set up and is a little pedestrian in doing so for my tastes, and will test the patience of others(looking at previous comments The Claim seems to have divisive opinions and understandably). Wes Bentley and Sarah Polley's characters are also not very well developed, not helped by a subplot that is unmoving and under-baked and a rather detached performance from Bentley. What is especially good about The Claim is how it looks, it is filmed absolutely beautifully and the scenery and wintery wastelands are both stunning and brooding. Michael Nyman's music is tense and hypnotic, though one asset that not everyone will have the same opinion about because people will argue that it's repetitive as well. I can understand, the chord structure and progressions are relatively so but the atmosphere it has and the orchestration are done really well. The songs are lovely, and sung as effectively sung and placed. The Claim is a very intelligently written film, one of Michael Winterbottom's strong points has been that even when a story is loose or not as linear as one expects(nothing wrong with that, there are a lot of great films that are somewhat unconventional) the script always comes alive in how thoughtful and intelligent it is, and that is the same with his direction as well. The story once it gets going is fascinating with mostly engaging subplots and well-fleshed-out characters(especially Mullen's Dillon), it is slow and deliberate but it is a film that is very rich on atmosphere. Also The Claim is based on The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy's writing is vivid stuff and the storytelling is also paced deliberately, The Claim makes an effort to stick to the spirit of that story and also to match its pace but admittedly more slowed down to allow the atmosphere to come through. And come through it does making the film really elegiac and haunting in tone, the moving scenes like the ending are really emotionally powerful. The Claim may not be your traditional Western, rich in atmosphere but not so much on action. But from what action there is, it is well staged and not that confusing. Peter Mullen is mesmerising giving his conflicted character a lot of meat and brooding intensity. Milla Jovovich has a beguiling presence, Sarah Polley while not having a well-developed character is still very able(much more so than Bentley) and Nastassja Kinski is very touching in a smaller role. In conclusion, The Claim is beautiful to watch, intelligent and brilliantly atmospheric, one of those films that proves that ambitious does work. 8/10 Bethany Cox

chaos-rampant In 1840's Missouri, the launching pad for manifest destiny, they used to say about people preparing to go West when it was most of it unsettled wilderness, that they were "jumping off". The film is about several such people who have made the jump from faraway homes, some are Irish come West with the famine, others Polish-born or from Lisbon."Jumping off", the phrase connotes the vastness of no man's land, a kind of cosmic gap.Ford's western wrote the legend, but left out those gaps of muddled life, which had to wait until around the time of Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The filmmaker shoots in this mode, so muddled life, drifting gaze, lingering shots of ordinary nothing. Vast mountain nature.But he also wants this to be an elegy to the passing of the West in that reflective vein of recent westerns, and some questionable acting, soporific drama and overly-emotive Nyman score, negate the unobtrusive lightness of just life. So this was probably ruined on a technical level, but there is something to recommend it.One of those who jumped off is a man, who in a log cabin one night with snow-blizzards raging outside, bartered everything he would need to be whole as an old man for what he would eventually have too much of to have any use for. He has built a town with his gold, but that night of years ago which has left a gap in him comes back one day.The notion is that you wake up one day and life has gone, and so long as it settles on this in a visual way, the film has spark. There is a great shot worthy of Herzog, where he has a two-story frame house hauled by horses across the snow, a home for his loved one— this is how deeply he regrets that night.This will be later mirrored in the whole town relocating to where the new railroad is going to pass through—which leaves him stubbornly alone in his empty town. This is followed by a great finale of madness and ruin.But there is too much doodling in the snow with second-rate romance and elegy, it never takes off from the edge. It's ultimately a letdown, which is a shame, because when you go through it all, there is a great film somewhere in there.

Marianka This movie has two main and huge problems: First, the plot is TERRIBLE. I thought there would be some psychological drama going on, but no and nothing. From the beginning to the end it's just dull dull dull, nothing going on, no good storyline, there were plenty of things I just did not understand at all, it was all confusing. I mean, the original idea was good, but that's about it. Second: it seems the director didn't think about how the scene looks like at all. Everything was new, it was obvious it had never been used before. People had new clothes on, even those working on the railroad, new tents (very clean, newly bought, newly built, not a drop of snow fell on them, although it seems to be snowing none stop.), some people have sunglasses (that could be my mistake, but were sunglasses common in the Sierra Nevada in 1887?), and nothing was realistic.The first twenty minutes I tried to watch the movie, then I had fun commenting it with my sister, but the second half, I was looking on the internet about it, see if some people liked it, because I couldn't really watch it anymore.Why do people shoot such movies? DON'T DO THAT ANYMORE! Please.