Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

rob_lavender The stars of Philip Ridley's masterful, dark drama are all known for bigger things, but to this reviewer's mind at least, they're never better than they are here. Made in 1995, the film boasts impressive turns from Brendan Fraser, Ashley Judd, Viggo Mortensen and Grace Zabriskie, and yet it remains almost unheard-of to this date. This is a genuine shame. Writer-director Ridley has crafted a pitch-perfect character study portraying the conflict between the immovable object of religion and the unstoppable force of sexuality. Darkly Noon (Fraser) is a young, naive man who escaped a massacre at the strict religious commune in which he grew up. Lost deep within the forest in Southern America, he's taken in by the beautiful Callie (Judd) and her mute lover Clay (Mortensen). Experiencing lust and envy for possibly the first time, he finds disturbed widow Roxy (Zabriskie), who helps him lay the blame for these alien emotions with his unwitting seductress. With some stunning cinematography and innovative editing techniques, Ridley increasingly introduces elements of fantasy as Darkly gradually slips into insanity, helping us follow his journey. A tense piece of work, the days are counted until we're told "Final Day" - the sequence of events comes as no surprise, but that doesn't lessen the impact whatsoever; rather it provides a ticking clock that adds to the unease.

Franco-23 I wanted to rent a film but decided not to do it because they were showing "Darkly Noon" on Cable TV. What a mistake! Since the beginning I started to dislike most of the characters: LY (Fraser) is mentally retarded and weird; CLAY (Mortensen) is dumb and has nothing heavy to offer to the plot; QUINCY (the black guy who purchases the coffins is like a butterfly trying to be funny and speaking nonsense); ROXY (Grace Zabriskie) is not only crazy, but depressing. You also get to see the dead parents of Ly, they made me sick, their role is so disgusting and meaningless that when I reached this point I started to wonder if I was being punished. The only light of this whole film is Ashley Judd as CALLIE: She is sweet and at the same time sexy and she knows she can be tempting. The other guy, Lauren Dean as JUDE was OK, a normal person! which is rare and valuable in this film. The story is stupid, the conversations are pointless, the scenery is boring ... please beware! I don't like to be so negative to a film, but this one was so tedious... a real waste of time.

um5 'The passion of Darkly Noon' is probably one of the worst movies I have ever watched. The reason why I stayed with it till the end was that I was curious how many more unreasonable, incoherent and irrelevant features were about to appear. This is not discrediting the actors, I leave that open, but only about the storyline.The plot is very simple and easy to guess after the first few minutes but then the movie keeps changing subject and focus. First, it is obviously the issue of Noon and Callie and that she is his first love after being brought up in a very isolated context. Then the movie shifts to the story between Callie and Roxy suggesting to become more of a mysterious thriller about witchcraft, but this is just a fake and does not go far. The appearance of Noon's parents adds to the issue but seemed to me completely ridiculous, furthered by the awful acting of both of them (and who did that make-up?). Towards the end the movie goes into longer and longer scenes. The climax (from the point where Noon starts painting himself in the cave until he is killed) could have been just as well expressed in half the time, the scenes drag on for ages. few more things. First, the undertaker. Who wrote this character into the movie? He is a joke and does not fit at all with the overall pace and depth the movie desperately but unsuccessfully tries to establish. His little helper (who finds Darkly Noon in the first place) speaks of Darkly as his friend, although they have only seen each other once or twice. The friendship was probably so emphasized in order to make the final shooting scene a hard decision for that guy (seeing that he has to kill his 'friend'). But the conflict does not appear at all in that scene (he quickly shoots Darkly and that's it).Last thing. What is the silver shoe all about? Was that to include some symbolic feature? Anything would have been more believable than a giant silver shoe floating down a river because a circus-family had an accident loosing that shoe on that river. How come the shoe floats past Darkly but is later used as a burning stake for Roxy's dog (would you incinerate your dog on a silver shoe? was it completely normal for Roxy to find a giant silver shoe? shouldn't the shoe have been much further downstream by the point it is used?). The circus family, who appears randomly in the last scene of the movie, did not only have one giant silver shoe, no, they also had a miniature model of it (which the son's 'favourite toy'). First of all, who believes that!? Second, his son's 'favourite toy'? Any stick is a better toy than a silver shoe (which will always remain a silver shoe, any wooden stick would be more interesting (because it would trigger the imagination) than an abstract silver shoe. By the way, Callie never saw the silver shoe before, so when it is presented to her it cannot have any meaning to her (and how helpful is a silver shoe after your house burned down!?)These were my major concern, rendering this movie completely ridiculous and horribly written.

phiggins Oh dear. This is such a dreadful movie. The guy from "The Mummy" and Ashley Judd - together at last. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - there has never been a good movie with the aforementioned Ms. Judd in it. Her career consists entirely of inept, banal, stupid movies. "Darkly Noon" is perhaps the zenith of her miserable little filmography, being pretentious and witless, "arty" and crass, cringe-inducing and hysterically funny (for all the wrong reasons). Take, as an example of this movie's momentous ineptitude, the final scene (one of my favourite in all movies), when the shoe floats downstream. Oh dear God, this is film-making as torture, as punishment, as though we, the hapless audience, have committed some crime and must be forced to watch deep and meaningful nonsense for the rest of our lives. Please, if you really think this is a good film, read a few books (preferably ones without pictures) and see a few genuinely intelligent movies. Soon. Hurry up! Time is running out!