Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

"The Gift" is an 8.5-minute live action short film from 2014 and so far the only filmmaking effort by Ivan Petukhov. And to see that he got Oscar-nominated actress Uma Thurman to play the central character here is quite something and the reason is that this is another entry to the series of Jameson short films, a project supported by actor Kevin Spacey that helped aspiring filmmakers in getting their stories to the screen. Spacey has starred in some of these himself and another actor you find participating is Adrien Brody. Anyway, back to this one here: It is basically a 2-people movie if you don't count the old lady early on. We got Thurman playing a really talented gift wrapper trying to help a magician with his ideas. It is a bit predictable es, but this really wasn't the main problem here. It may have been the script. Thurman definitely elevated the material at times, but I still found it difficult to care for any of the characters and what would happen to them next. I am not sure what it was. It wasn't really funny, so not a comedy, it certainly wasn't dramatic, so not a drama and the romance element was not enough either in both quantity or quality to call it a little romance piece. Maybe you could just call it a character study. But not one that was good enough for me to recommend it or give me hope that Petukhov returns to filmmaking soon sadly. Only worth seeing for the very biggest Uma Thurman fans. Everybody else can skip it and they will not be missing out on a lot here.