This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Talk about a midlife crisis. Kevin Spacey's character, Quoyle, has one with such bizarre contributors as only a novelist could conjure up. Annie Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her 1993 novel of this same title. The story wreaks soap opera throughout except for its setting and a slower, more deliberate layout of the plot. Most soaps have that confined indoors look and feel, and the outdoors of Newfoundland in this film go against that. But the story is one huge melodrama. Drawn out and slowed down, but quite a melodrama. I first saw this film in the theater. Seeing it again years later, I have the same reaction. It's a strange story, maybe the start of a happy ending, but just sort of dull. This film doesn't have much life, but then that may be what the point is – at least at the start. I just don't find that sort of thing very enjoyable. I understand that some people may, and that's fine for them. It's passable mostly because of the setting and the good acting we see. Besides Spacey, principals are Julianne Moore as Wavey Prowse and Judi Dench as Aunt Agnis. I liked some of the minor performances as well – Pete Postlethwaite as Tert Card and native Newfoundlander Gordon Pinsent as Billy Pretty. This type of film isn't for everyone – even most folks perhaps. If one is in the doldrums, it's not recommended. If one is in a chipper mood, this might even nip that back a bit.

The novel "The Shipping News" caused quite a splash when it was published. I never read it. I remember hearing about a movie being made from the book, and then not hearing much more about it. Now I know why. The film is a queasy concoction of human depravity, despair, beautiful scenery, colorful stereotypical characters, and clairvoyance. Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore, two of my favorite actors, perform as if they are on Thorazine, and Judy Dench hams it up shamelessly (to her credit, she deepens up a bit towards the end.) I began to feel displaced, as if I wound up in a cold climate when I expected to be in Macondo. Magical Realism very far afield. I suffered through the entire movie out of laziness and masochism, hoping that at least one of the characters would be put out of their misery at its end.

A man. And his search for real roots. A aunt as incarnation of old stories - shadows of roots. And his daughter like guide for a a world very strange. Terra Nova. A new land. Maybe a perfect house or place for hove a sense. And the memory of a woman for who the pieces of gray childhood is gone. A death. And a new beginning. A story by Annie Proulx. Signs of novels colors. And a cast who makes the events slices of a bread. History of truth of life, movie is , like novel, form for carpe diem. With errors, fake ways, hopes and science to discover the others as parts of himself. A travel to the real person for build freedom. Parable without great ambitions. Basic steps and a delicate love story as key for the hidden room. And Kevin Spacey. As frame of his roles. Judi Dench. As seed of story. Cate Blanchette. Shadow of a passing evil.

Laborious, ungodly concoction, derived from E. Annie Proulx's novel, plays like a John Ford movie without Maureen O'Hara. Sad-sack single father, having recently lost the mother of his child in a car accident (after she apparently sold the little girl in the black market, who was then rescued), starts life anew in Newfoundland; he earns his mettle as a reporter on the newspaper staff, and falls in love with what appears to be the only single woman in town (this being a cookie-cutter picture at heart, she naturally returns his affections). The clichéd townspeople are made up of bull-headed fisherman and salty old codgers, each with an axe to grind (they're stock figures left over from the 1940s). Kevin Spacey's look of bewilderment and shock is appropriate for the leading character, but acting benumbed doesn't do much for the audience. His rapport with the ladies (Cate Blanchett as the loose-living Petal, Julianne Moore as the well-scrubbed Wavey, and Judi Dench as Aunt Agnis) is warm without being too convincing, while the scenario (cluttered up with pirates and ghosts and curses and a house held down by ropes) verges on the ridiculous. Lasse Hallström directs, shamelessly. *1/2 from ****