Excellent but underrated film

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Blistering performances.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Expectations were high for this movie but it soon becomes clear that none of the characters are likable, all are broken and you can't relate to any of them.This movie is dark, disjointed moments in the lives of the two main characters and those in their lives.Do we still understand why the guy leaves his wife and two kids, even though he does seem to really miss them? Do we understand why everything is so dirty and so old and the weather is always so miserable? I like movies that make me work at understanding them, I like to be challenged by characters who are unlikable. The ending is inevitable, no one gets what they want, content in their disconnection from life.This movie left me feeling dirty, depressed and hopeless.Was that the intent of the director?

This movie is not good at all. Apart from the explicit sex scenes, which seemed to be the first ones to be screened in the UK, I do not see what's new about this movie.A man and a woman sharing their bodies for pleasure only. Sex-based communication and that's it. So, what else?Kerry's acting is fine enough though. A couple of scenes in foggy weather are interesting to watch. However, the man getting obsessed about her without being able to ask her a thing instead... it's just pathetic.If a movie needed to show explicit sex scenes without being in the category of "pornographic film" in the UK, then I don't get it why to write such a very simple plot with anything extraordinary in this. I think it's just a waste of time watching this film!

A film more famous for the unsimulated sex on show than for any inherent artistic value. Naturally, the performances are very concentrated - the matter of the film (trying to have and eat the cake of a vast, exciting but impersonal London) and the sexual acts mean that everyone is very focused. I guess it also comes from working with an iconic director too.This is not to say that the performances are good. I like Rylance but I think he overplays his hand here. Conversely I don't think that Marianne Faithful brings anything to the film. Spall's cab driver is ill-served with the script leftovers. This leaves Kerry Fox to prop the film up and she creates quite a remarkable character actually, a temporal bohemian spirit in an article, middle-class body.What Chereau's film does achieve is, amazingly, a sense of urban romance, even in the bleak existential wastes of these people's lives. You have to wait for the very final shot, over which run the credits, to get the full measure of this. 3/10

I thought that this movie was interesting because one does not see 'Real Sex' in regular Hollywood movies, real sex is only seen in X rated movies. Its nice to see a different 'Real' take on what is illuded to in most films with sex scenes in them. I would have given this good movie a higher rating but I had not much if anything to compare it to other than any NC-17 movies I have seen in the past. NC-17 movies I thought contained the most nudity next to adult rated X movies. Even though mostly teenage boys will like this film for its inherent sexual content, I watched this film with my girlfriend and she said that it was a very enjoyable and very different movie in the way sex is used to explain the story.