Holstra Boring, long, and too preachy.

Twilightfa Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

SnoopyStyle American writer/lecturer Tom Ricks (Ethan Hawke) comes to Paris desperate to reconnect with his daughter. He's not wanted by his ex. He ends up in a dilapidated hotel where the manager Sezer is holding his passport hostage. He works for the unsavory character watching a door. His neighbor is a threatening brute. Then he meets Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) at a literary party. They have an affair. He's stalking his little girl. He has another affair with the café girl which could cause him trouble with Sezer.This is trying to be an atmospheric moody mystery thriller. The pacing is too slow to be thrilling. The atmosphere is indie adjacent and a little dreary. It could be much more moody and stylish. The one thing that this movie desperately needs is energy. Ethan Hawke is decidedly angry and tired. Writer/director Pawel Pawlikowski has a certain style here, and it grinds away at the movie. It's a movie that is trying to come up with something compelling.

Bene Cumb Otherwise, it is too complex and confusing, full of non-deliberated characters and events providing no value to the course of action, e.g. Tom's (Hawke) relationship with Margit (rather trivial performance by Kristin Scott Thomas) and his odd job organized by his landlord Sezer (also rather uninviting Samir Guesmi). The ending is odd as well and when the credits appear, you will realize that you have just seen an over-sophisticated and protracted piece of work where you finally wanted to get some answers, but got more and new questions instead. Even based of insanity and mysterious events, there are far better movies out there.Avoid, if you do not have to :)

secondtake The Woman in the Fifth (2011)Well, the reason this movie gets some pretty awful reviews is the utter confusion of the plot. And yet it's a deliberate confusion--which is no excuse. It just means this isn't quite bad filmmaking, but a bad decision or two taken too far.You see, the main character, played with ease and almost familiarity by Ethan Hawke, is mentally unstable. He seems to have two distinct realities, and these are easily confused by the viewer. And in one of these realities he does terrible things, though it isn't clear because we see those terrible things as innocently as he does (which is to say, not at all, it seems). The character, Tom Ricks, is an American in Paris, a writer ostensibly in town to find and visit his daughter. But the mother's reaction to his showing up at their house is the first clue that something is wrong. This seemingly smart and very nice fellow scares her to call to the police. We see Ricks run to save himself from arrest but we don't quite know if he's to blame or if the mother is just overreacting.The fact is the confusions in the movie are overwhelming. Maybe there was a better logic somewhere that an editor, under pressure from a producer or distributor, made much out of. Or maybe it was an artful decision to leave us bewildered, to spend time and emotional energy gathering the pieces and clues. The director, Pawel Pawlikowski, has something of a success or two behind him and so might have pretensions that got the better of things here. In a way, the movie is better than it's overall impression by the end. There are numerous scenes that show a modern Paris very far removed--and much more revealing--than the glorified city seen in both mainstream French movies and American love letters like Woody Allen's recent time-travel. And the acting is overall restrained and convincing. In its bones, this is a substantial movie. Most of all, the cinematography is superb, some of the best creative stuff I've seen recently, dependent not on creative editing but on smart visual seeing--framing, kinetics, focus, and so on. I think you could watch it on many levels with great pleasure if you knew ahead of time the overall meaning and plot were going to be a mess.Without forewarning, I'm guessing it leaves mostly frustration and bitterness.

Anonymous Guest The whole movie is depressing nihilistic garbage that raises many questions in the minds of the viewers and fails to answer any of them tying off loose ends. The setting is dreary and makes you want to contemplate suicide.We start off with a depressed sack of **** writer who wrote one novel and is visiting Paris, France to talk to stalk his daughter who he wants to see but can't because his wife has a restraining order on him.Early on in the movie he talks to his daughter, the daughter asks if he was in prison, and he says he was in a hospital. It seems apparent that he's mentally unstable and was likely confined in an asylum. The entire movie may in fact be his own scrambled and distorted thoughts while he's kept in a mental institution, but we don't know this for sure, and the movie never reveals anything.The writer falls asleep on a bus and gets robbed. He has nothing and ends up in staying over at some Arabic m**-****e's cafeteria for free but his passport is taken from him until he pays up. He's half-ass-ed some write up about a forest with an owl and red beetles and so on whilst staying there and gets invited to some literary club. There he meets a strangely 1-dimensional woman, alone out on a balcony, after having listened to a (different) woman tell him about an artist's need for love to create. It will become more apparent later but the woman he meets on the balcony seems not to be a part of his imaginings, which is suggested even more so later on by her saying that she knew everything about him, and also by her revealing little about her own life... other than that her husband was a writer and is dead.Hmmmm....Anyways, so he also has this affair with another woman in the Arab cafeteria he's staying in and this annoying N***o next door who the writer had a dispute with over the use of the shared toilet earlier finds out he's getting intimate with said woman in the cafeteria. The N***o demands a large sum of Eros and even pushes a note to the man requesting he pay up. **** gets wacky when the N***o is found murdered in the bathroom with a toilet brush stuffed up his mouth and blood everywhere. The writer is taken to prison because they think he killed him. The writer himself was over at the woman he met on balcony's house having intercourse with her at the time though and he uses her as an alibi. According to the police though that note where the N***o demanded those Eros from him, had only his finger prints on it, and the woman on the balcony was dead long ago....Oh crap I forgot about how at some point he's offered a job as a kind of security guy by the Arab m**-****e so he can still keep living there. Some strange illegal **** goes on there, or at least that's heavily implied, and anyways he has to let people in who ring the bell if they say they want to see this guy (whose named translated into English means "The World"). I wonder if this is metaphorical for him letting people... oh I don't know.At the end of it all some more **** happens (Arab m**-****e goes to jail instead of him, he's released), daughter goes missing, is found again, and at the very end it seems he joins balcony woman indefinitely, which means he committed suicide I guess, or perhaps his mind broke completely. I don't know.If this movie has a point, it would appear to be to illustrate how ****ty life is in France where multiculturalism, broken families, crime, decay, and so on have ruined life for the white French man.Tl;Dr Horrible movie full of bad feels and loose ends set in dreary multicultural-f***ed Paris, France. Don't watch it or you'll end up like me wasting even more time just trying to figure it all out.