Truly Dreadful Film

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

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

I had heard this movie was well regarded, but after sitting through nearly two hours of a very thin plot, I cannot understand why.

This film started to depict usual park.  It was so funny day.  There were some couples, parents and children and performers.  But one couple was tapped by some men.  I thought this couple was just main character in this film, because they looked victim indeed and this seemed to center around this couple.  So I had no idea about Harry Caul who was the real main character and the incident waiting for him at first. I think this film has multiple theme. One of the theme is the fear of surveillance.  We go several places and live in everyday life.  There are some surveillance camera everywhere of town.  Then, does one might say that our privacy is protected?  The answer is no.  Our privacy is infringed unconsciously.  This film might want to say about that.

"The Conversation" feels rather overblown to me. The plot is a bit on the thin side but Gene Hackman gives another great performance as the surveillance expert who doesn't always enjoy his work. He is cast against type here and is easily up to the task. Hackman is much more reserved, unassuming and slightly withdrawn from the world. He lives for his work and not much else. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of friends and prefers it that way. Look out for Harrison Ford in a small role as a Government man who avoids answering Gene Hackman's questions. Parts of "The Conversation" work but the film doesn't quite gell as a whole. A shame as Francis Ford Coppola's direction is very good and the photography is effective.

Great movie and comprehensible that both FFC and Gene Hackman claim this to be their own favorite among those where they had their fingers in.The film starts with a bird's eye view on San Francisco's Union Square and the camera is zooming in onto a street clown who is molesting all kind of people with his grimace. Among them there is a man feeling uncomfortable of being put into the center of attention and therefore tries to ignore the clown and to get out of his way. Soon we know why. The man is a surveillance expert who is observing the wiretap operation on a young couple, which is walking around the square. We start hearing conversation scraps of those being spied on and from this very beginning, one is torn into a story, which in the end is turned upside down.Did the couple know that it was the target of a wiretap operation? Did the spied on couple mention certain things in their conversation on purpose and in a manipulative intent? Is it always easy for a surveillance expert to live with the consequences of his business results? Has the surveillance expert only been a chess piece in a greater game he could not oversee? Things are not quite clear in the end or are they? At the very end, we see the disillusioned Protagonist playing the sax in his own apartment, which he has just devastated in order to find the bug, which was presumably used for spying on the spy. According to me a great philosophical ending.Besides, the movie features a young Harrison Ford in an impressive side role, which he plays in a cool and mysterious way. This is so much better than he being Indiana Jones. Then there is this special atmosphere from the 70's, which is quite evident in the movie but maybe this only has a certain charm for someone like me who has still experienced this period