Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Tacticalin An absolute waste of money

Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Brennan Camacho Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Ivan Lalic Being artistic doesn't always mean you have made the decent flick. Sometimes, the artistic can be so arrogant that it suffocates decent story. This is just the case with Austrian "Revanche", an incredibly dull and slow movie coming from nowhere and leading nowhere.Nothing is right here. The naive and empty script, empty long cuts and pretentious acting tend to irritate rather than to suck the viewer inside the revenge story in rural Austria."Revanche" is one over prized and vanity-filled flick. Nomination for Best foreign language film shouldn't have even been taken into consideration let alone be read in Kodak theater.

p-stepien A love in the underworld between Russian prostitute Tamara (Irina Potapenko) and bordello body-guard Alex (Johannes Krisch) leads them to embrace the perspective of escape from the harsh realities of debts owed to crime bosses. The solution to their worries is a bank heist, during which Tamara dies after being fatally wounded by a stray bullet from police officer Robert (Andreas Lust). Engrieved Alex hides out at his grandfather's (Johannes Thanheiser) farm, where he spends his days chopping wood for the winter. However grief turns to concepts of vengeance, when it turns out that Robert and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss) are neighbours.Starting off from a seedy, hopeless love affair, after a few scenes certainty of an emotional train-ride becomes evident. As the story unfolds and takes various turns, moral dilemmas take the forefront, as death, sorrow, remorse and regret construe a fascinating psychological story, where revenge isn't limited to a simple pulling of the trigger lacking forethought. As Alex, Robert and Susanne interact questions raised reach satisfying, if uneasy, conclusions, as a full circle is reached, making this one of the most poignant movies on the question of revenge, much detached from the typical Hollywood or Hong Kong take on the matter.The story has a unmistakable natural flow (partly owed to the settings and the camera-work), as happenings build the story without effort or forced connections. As if to underline this music score is done away with, only the noise of the streets and background of nature fill the space between infrequent dialogues. All this allows Götz Spielmann to deliver a focused, straight story without visual distractions or voyages into the supposed 'darkness' of the human heart.

thisissubtitledmovies Celebrated Austrian writer and director Götz Spielmann's 2008 revenge thriller Revanche premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival to critical acclaim. It won and was nominated for numerous international film awards, including a nomination for the 2009 Acadamy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.With Revanche, Speilmann has crafted a stylish, tasteful film with an awful lot in its favour. Unfortunately, too often it doesn't quite hang together as it should, the plot strays into the realms of far-fetched and contrived, and it feels that too often Speilmann is reliant on old standard clichés rather than striving to plough new furrows. Definitely a director to watch, but sadly Revanche's faults stop it from being the brilliant thriller it could - and should - have been. LB

Muldwych When his girlfriend is murdered during a bank robbery escape attempt, former convict Alex vows to take revenge on the man who pulled the trigger. Vengeance seems to make perfect sense until he meets his target face-to-face.'Revanche' is a film that holds its cards close to its chest. Just when you think you have the story pinned in the first half-hour, all hell breaks loose and the film takes a wholly unexpected turn. It is a film that not only challenges you to predict what comes next, but one that forces you to decide whether revenge ever makes sense, to confront feelings of anguish and make decisions you can live with. In the character of Alex, we have a man used to dealing with the rougher side of humanity, which has hardened him in order to survive. The loss of his girlfriend Tamara robs him of the only time he allows himself to be someone else, at peace with the world. Into this world comes the unassuming presence of Robert, a policeman committed to serving the public, yet whom has never faced the hardest part of the job: taking a life. When Robert is confronted by this reality, it is then that we truly learn who he is. This, ultimately, is what the film is about - throwing ordinary people into life's darkest waters and seeing whether or not they will swim back into the light. Writer and director Götz Spielmann presents the viewer with a very compelling drama, which, through its cast of identifiably real characters, engages the viewer throughout. The lines may be drawn between those who feel wronged, but at no time is it ever easy for the viewer to take sides.This perhaps explains the film's pacing and choice of photography. The basic storyline as described could very easily apply to a fast-paced Hollywood blockbuster, trading humanity and intelligence for cliché and car chases. Yet in the truer world of grocery shopping and household chores, moments of high drama are spaced apart by long periods of calm inactivity, leaving people to brood into the small hours over the choices they have made - the perfect environment within which feelings of revenge and misery can blossom. 'Revanche' is paced in such a way, with the principal characters having to tend to family and the ordinary demands of life while barely holding themselves together over the losses they have suffered. Yet these are their only opportunities to heal and come to terms with their pain. Spielmann accentuates these sequences with often picturesque long shots within which silence reigns and the magnitude of the suffering seems to pale into comparison with the enormity of the surrounding world.Johannes Krisch, who some IMDb readers have intriguingly compared to Robert Carlysle, is well-cast as the hardened Alex. He not only looks the part, but conveys just the right mix of softness within a wary, battle-worn shell. Andreas Lust, as Robert, expertly portrays the policeman whose life collapses beneath him, propelling him into a world of anguish and self-doubt. Credit also goes to Johannes Thanheiser as Alex's grandfather, a man for whom life is much the same each day, yet this is no reason to complain, and Ursula Strauss as Susanne, who, as Robert's wife, must balance her role as supporter in difficult times with her needs as a woman.Ultimately, the film leaves the viewer to tie up the loose ends, inviting comment on the drama that has unfolded. This is definitely a strong effort from all concerned, and a very mature approach to what easily could have been a simplistic action snuff piece. It's art imitating life with frankness and honesty, and worthwhile viewing. Actual rating: 7 1/2 stars.