Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

SnoopyStyle Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell) is a teen loner. He suspects his stepmother Verity (Claire Forlani) killed his mother. He's also a peeping Tom. He is pushed out of his home by Verity and his father Julius (Ciarán Hinds) and ends up in Edinburgh. He is taken with hotel manager Kate Breck (Sophia Myles) who resembles his mother. She gives him a menial job and he starts peeping in on her. She is having an affair with married employee Alasdair.Jamie Bell continues to show that he is more than Billy Elliot. He has grown up to be a young man. He has a damaged darkness and also a sweet vulnerability. Sophia Myles also shows that duality. The movie never gets too dark. It's really interesting to see Jamie Bell expand his repertoire.

Knox D Alford III (knoxiii) Hallum Foe is a name that grabs your attention. It was well-received by over 10,000 IMDb voters and averages an impressive 7/10 stars. I believe it was made with a budget of 3 Million & got a return of about 60 Million. So, I proudly join the crowd that really enjoyed it. When it was over, and still now, I am struggling to express the reasons it was so good and almost universally appealing. Life is very tough for Hallum Foe, the main character's name. He despises one member of his family, believes another is being manipulated, and recently endured the loss of a very important part of his life. Understandably, he keeps to himself & becomes enamored in a nonsexual way to the frowned upon hobby of voyeurism. He ends up with no money in a big city & sleeps anywhere he can fit his body. Then one day he sees a girl. He engineers a scenario to talk to her because she is a stunningly gorgeous blonde professional (Sophia Myles). Sophia stole the show. While Hallum was battling adversity & falling in love with a slightly older woman (He seemed to be about 18), Sophia Myles did everything possible in her acting to come across as the most desirable woman I have seen on film in some time. She is the girlfriend & marrying type, but admits she's no good at relationships. At some point, things really start going Hallum's way & really serves as a testament to the quality of woman who seeks to understand him when 90% or more women would walk away. Hallum excels at his job & earns a promotion, & gets a number of confidence building life wins. He solves a mystery that deeply hurts him throughout the movie. Despite the sadness of where he begins, Hallum defeats all Foe's, and makes a quirky & odd journey to the other side of sadness. No wonder people love it. Who doesn't want to see a likable yet imperfect character find his stride in the face of daunting odds. Sophia really plays the all round perfect woman in ways I just don't want to give away. You have never seen a movie like this before & it is different in so many ways. It was filmed in Scotland & has appropriate British & Scottish accents that are easily understandable. The great thing is it isn't an English story, because it could be imagined in any city. I hope you enjoy the film, as you might have guessed by now, I certainly did. Knox D. Alford, III

tedg There's a half in "Chung King Express" that has stuck with me. It is an expression of being and seeing that is close to the core of this film. It is so much better, deeper, that it hampers my appreciation for what is here. I wonder if that is a particularly good thing; if there is something to be valued by the newness of discovered loneliness. I came to this in spite of the male actor, who was involved in one of the most trivial instances of wasted time I've had. He wasn't responsible for it of course, but actors are tokens, and even child actors carry responsibility for bad choices. I came because the filmmaker made "Young Adam."If you do not know that film, it is deep and real. The filmmaker has some insight into the outer limits of accidental couples. Its an adventure in anti romance and resulting sadness. The same thing drives this, but from a more traditional form.In "Young Adam," the context was real life, a river of life that was imagined and received as genuine. Here, the context is moved to a strictly movie reality: the "coming of age" business that we know so well it seems more real. There's some simple wrapping that allows us to accept this: a mother's suicide, but the matter of this is the impossibility of the real in relationships.Sophia Myles — a sort of Rachel Weiss done right — is the woman here, one of them. Her job is to be a character that stands both in real life and this imagined notion of a sexual teacher. We need that for this to work, because we need to see why this kid would fall in love with her, by us falling in love as well. Its all about the tension created between what you know and what you desperately want to.Her job is cleverly supported in the story in three ways. The first and most obvious is that she is the lover and the reflection of the lost mother (because of physical similarity). We even have a "Vertigo" reference to subtly help us in this. The second is that she is observed, watched, the same way we are watching the movie. Its Hitchcock again.The third has to do with her as a sort of casting director who finds roles for her clients, and the boy having this pathology of having to play roles. Its a makeup and costume thing that is implanted in the story, seemingly but not really sensibly.It all works. Its all rather effective, until the writer's copout at the end. Until then, you get entangled in the inevitability of disappointment in love. The more you see it on screen, the more you cling to the opposite in your life. Its a wonderful mechanism and I think unique to film. Seeing damage makes you the fixer.But it is compromised in the Ned when the filmmaker (and no doubt his funders) wanted the thing to end happily, with our hero visibly coming of age. We literally have to see him walking down the street in what we will know as a more mature posture. Stop, dear viewer, before that part. So you can trust in love.Its nice seeing Claire Forlani back in a cleverly sculpted project.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Aristides-2 SPOILERS-SPOILERS-SPOILERSA technically gorgeous, beautifully acted movie, 'Hallam Foe' is nevertheless a niche film. Its focus group comprises smart adolescent boys who need a well made sexy movie to masturbate to as well as young men in their late thirties, who simply didn't have fulfilled the sexual adventures/relationships that they would have liked to have had. The story suffers for this specialized conceit. Early on the film skillfully suggests that the beautiful and sexy stepmother may be the killer of the leading character's, beloved mother. The first serious stroke scene has the stepmother unbelievably seducing the inexperienced 17 year old. 'Unbelievably' because in fact the movie ends by showing that she had nothing to do with the mother's death; the point of her seduction however was to imply how evil she is: not only kills the kid's mother and marries his father, but also corrupts him. So if she's not evil why would she jeopardize her marriage with someone the movie shows she is in love with (which attraction is reciprocated by her husband) to have sex with a teenager who has serious mental health issues (later on in the movie someone who knows him well describes him as 'creepy'. Yeah, he is!) But suddenly, he's cut loose by his parents and kicked out of the house (without any financial help by the way) and finds himself in Edinboro. On his second day in that city of a half a million people, he spots from a distant rooftop, walking in the street, a Doppelganger of his mother (except she's blond). Supposedly Ted Bundy's victims were quite often dark haired young women who parted their long hair in the middle, like his mum did. But the director of 'Mr. Foe' wants to make sure everyone really understands the prolonged Freudian anxiety this kid is going through and actually uses the same actress to be shown as dead mom. The mark of a not well thought out movie is finding Coincidence to smooth over story weaknesses or niche films and this major move of finding his faux mother is a classic of banal coincidence.Naughty, naughty! In closing, I do admit that this is probably the best made exploitation movie I've seen but alas, it is what it is.