SmugKitZine Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

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

Robert J. Maxwell Kate Bekinsale is an art restorer working on a painting that's hundreds of years old, depicting a chess game. She uncovers a hidden Latin inscription -- "Who Killed the Horse"? The "horse", someone informs her, refers to the white night shown in the painting. The man who owns the painting tells Bekinsale that the figures in the painting are his ancestors. The owner is murdered.After that, I was lost. Bekinsale pics up some chess hustler to help her unravel the game in the painting. What were the previous moves. Each time a previous position is figured out, somebody dies. (I think.) Now, I am no dummy when it comes to chess. When I was ten years old I played a dozen games simultaneously while blindfolded. True, I lost every game. I'm not ignorant of movies either. I've had a sterling career as an unknown extra in literally a few movies that sank without leaving a trace. But the point is, if I remember it, that the plot of this movie involves chess and it was beyond my comprehension.Not that it's entirely without virtues. Kate Bekinsale in 1994 is very cute, dressed and groomed a la gamin, and in one scene she appears topless, dressed only in a pair of skivvies. Maybe that's when all thoughts of chess were ablated.Watch it, if you want, but it's a long, slow, murky slog -- except for that nude scene that lasts about fifteen seconds.

ardie_too-1 Uncovered isn't Citizen Kane. It's a light mystery involving a painting that's being restored. The cast was more than up to the job, but for all but one of them the performances were average.Other than the city of Barcelona, the single stand-out member of the cast is Peter Wingfield playing the rough, small-time, self absorbed and slightly oily gigolo, Max LaPena. He pulls this role off to perfection. He's young, gorgeous, not as smooth or as smart as he thinks he is and although he's a total brat, there's a desperate vulnerability to Max that would be very attractive to many women. Max LaPena is a street kid who's parlayed his face and body into a marriage with the greedy, controlling, grand-daughter, and sole heir of the aristocratic Spanish family that owns the mysterious painting. Max, as do others in this film, has his own dreams regarding the painting and isn't above using his assets to make those dreams come true. He's wonderfully amoral and by far the most interesting character in Uncovered. In this mildly entertaining film it's the scenes of beautiful Barcelona and an equally handsome and very talented Peter Wingfield that make it worth the rental fee or purchase price.

tedg No question in my mind, there's no question that the vitality of film these days is in the hands of Spanish storytelling: layered narrative, magical deviations from causality, sex as physics. The beauty of woman and places deeply rooted to the elegance of understanding.There are narrative notions and cinematic qualities being nurtured in this broad community that are worth nurturing by us through appreciation. Here's a project that when you sum it all up is a dreadful movie, but it knows what it is about in terms of some intelligent ideas. It just didn't have the talent to match those ideas.Here's the deep spine which is attempted: Pérez-Reverte writes mystery stories in a magical realism tradition. His device is usually to play between the happening of a thing and the representation of that happening in a book or painting. The idea is to fold his representation (his book) into the story, reaping all sorts of storytelling advantages. Once these layers are established, he can jump in and out of various levels, and so can we as readers and some of the main characters as they develop insight. Layers are narrative layers, story threads, time, and almost always abstraction layers in terms of creating events and creating laws behind those events.But the books themselves have problems. The ideas in their construction are a whole lot more engaging than the books themselves. The actual skill at storytelling just isn't masterful enough to control, channel and exploit these conceptual tides that have been unleashed.One of his books was made into a film by a true master filmmaker, Polanski, and starred someone who knows that rare trick of layered or folded acting, where you inhabit more than one layer at a time. You had to work at it, but "Ninth Gate" really is as good as its ideas, and the ideas are in that film are both richer and crisper than in the source book.And now we have this film of another of Pérez-Reverte's works. A simpler book in key ways.One change it makes is to relocate the story to Barcelona and Gaudi's architecture. He is our most "folded" architect, and that change shows some real understanding of what is at stake. The filmmaker here is the guy who best exploited the environmental fabric of New Orleans to transform a simple story into a pretty interesting film in "The Big Easy." For some reason, he is unable to do the same here. I think he could have if he had more time to get into the rhythm of the place, which is less hedonistic than New Orleans but more achingly romantic; more poundingly African under a sunny, slightly mechanical nonchalance. The project could have used this, and it was in his power, but it eludes us this time.And that lack of control extends to more mundane production elements. The balance between realism and theatrical stereotypes/architypes was lost, probably unachievable with this cast.The cast centers on Kate Beckinsale as our surrogate detective, who really is alluring, and in precisely the way the project demands: physically, she is made here as befitting of the place: sloppy, casual (unshaven pits), boyish face, innocent questioner on the surface -- deeply sexual and possibly powerful underneath. But she couldn't deliver that last part, the power part. Indeed, any emotion is amateurish. I haven't really paid much attention to her later work. I think it about the same.So. What we have is a parcel of really great ideas. Important, central ones if you love movies and seriously use them in building a life and life awareness. These are all here, but mostly implicit. You have to almost ignore the movie to see them.But along the way, you get a pretty girl, the most intriguing city on the planet, and a painting that is worthy of its role.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

vandino1 This one is for that small coterie of Kate Beckinsale fans. She's quite young here and, with a tomboyish haircut, looks and acts like a post-Disney Hayley Mills. And a little obligatory nudity from our heroic pixie helps her fans put up with the mediocre goings-on before and after. The film itself has an interesting core idea, but I frankly thought it would be more about the ramifications of the painting's ancient mystery (ala 'Da Vinci Code') than an excuse to pile up present-day murders via a chess game associated with the painting. Of course, I didn't realize that this film is from 1994, before the 'Da Vinci Code' phenomenon. But the chess game routine is quite old hat, 1994 or otherwise. The music score is also far too lighthearted and bouncy for what is supposed to be a thriller. As always, the carnage accumulating around the heroine doesn't seem to faze the cops who appear to wait for the next killing, show up, then calmly survey the damage and ponder why it just keeps happening around our female lead. This one is a time killer for those who have way too much time on their hands.