SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Breakinger A Brilliant Conflict

WillSushyMedia This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Primadonna Billed as a kind of sequel to The Full Monty, about unemployed men in Sheffield, this movie is a fake.As someone born in Sheffield, and still with links to the city, I was extremely disappointed by this film. Someone said it could have been set in Oklahoma, and that just about sums it up for me. This looked like a romantic view of northern England made for the US market. Probably many Americans - and many southern English people - don't realize that Sheffield is a big city of around half a million inhabitants, with a sophisticated urban culture. In Among Giants it was depicted as some dreary dead-end semi-rural small town, where everyone in Sheffield seemed to drink in the same old-fashioned pub, and where the people's idea of a party was line-dancing in some village-hall lookalike. This was a small close-knit community, not a metropolitan city.The working-class Sheffield men were totally unlike their real-life counterparts, who are generally taciturn and communicate with each other in grunts and brief dry remarks. They don't chatter, and they certainly don't sing in choirs.Even the rural settings, supposedly in the Peak District, looked alien to me. I recognized a few places where I used to go hiking, but some of the aerial shots of pylons stretching out over a bleak landscape reminded me more of Wales. Indeed, in the credits at the end I spotted a reference to Gwynedd, Wales. The Peak District is, in the summer, crawling with walkers and tourists in cars. It is situated between two big cities. It is not some kind of wilderness.As for the notion that a young woman could fall in love with, and lust after, Pete Postlethwaite, that was ludicrous, and could only have been a male dream. Her reasons for becoming his lover were never made apparent. None of the men was shown as having a partner or families; they existed in a vacuum.Anyone wanting to see a film about unemployed Sheffielders would have been led astray. This Sheffield existed only in the minds of its middle-class writers and film-makers.It was a gigantic fake!

Paul Creeden I will begin by saying that Pete Postlethwaite and Rachel Griffiths are personal favorites. I initially thought I would like this film because they were in it. Not the case at all. I was impressed with the film because it cuts close to the bone of proletarian culture, a widespread proletarian culture of the overeducated and underemployed classes of the so called First World economies, or Northern economies. The film could as easily have been set in Oklahoma. There is a two-step dancing scene that makes this quite obvious. So, on the surface, the story of the older divorced man with the younger liberated single woman seems rather typical, often told. The lads, the pack of macho misfits, also provide much of the predictable bonded male nonsense. And, folks, it is realistic. That's the part that got under my skin. If you grew up in an American suburb and now live in a gated community or a condominium, it might be too painful for you to let some of the movie's message in. Yes, indeed, the few live on the backs of this many. And their lives do indeed reflect the burden. If you are willing to consider what is really happening behind the obvious of this work, I think you will be impressed too.

hexa-2 This apology for a movie is about absolutely nothing! Rachel Griffiths must have needed the money. The film must have been made on a very low budget, because the lighting was non existent. I made a vow if I ever see Pete Postlesumthingor other I'll commit suicide. I'd be happy to know if there was 1) a plot or 2)a script. My biggest regret is I wasted my time watching this rubbish.

bud-20 this is a must see movie for those who love Pete and Rachel. although unlikely lovers, it is refreshing to see a movie which does not go down the standard Hollywood road of beautiful man meets beautiful woman; they argue, they fight, they then fall in love. this script is life as it is, not as it might be if we all lived in the typical studio executive mind...