Savage Grace

The characters elicit no empathy and all seem to have empty and pointless lives. The most interesting part was the what happened next notes at the end.

Neither savage nor graceful, Savage Grace's creaky -- and creepy -- tale of mother-son incest doesn't get the art-film benefit-of-the-doubt that led critics to acclaim Swoon.

Nowhere near as sexy as the previews made it look, I promise. It's actually a big downer. The performances are good, but I was struck midway through by the fact that I was spending my time watching a fictionalized version of the messed-up personal lives of some incomprehensibly wealthy people who aren't at all sympathetic. That's all it is really. It's well done, but there just wasn't much good material here to begin with.

In the hands of a more skillful director, Julianne Moore's fierceful performance (and stylish settings) would have gotten a much more cohesive and better film.

Controversial wannabe dullness!

Somehow managed to make the story less interesting than the real life version. Ngl though, it's worth a watch.

bizarre and well made.........

Graceless and sensationalistic true crime melodrama that somehow manages to be both lurid and tepid. Little insight into the unappealing characters is really offered, the direction is fairly artless, and the decision to flit from decade to decade and location to location seems to serve little narrative purpose other than as an attempt to convince audiences of the decadent “coolness” of the lifestyles of the rich and infamous.

"Rather than imitate the postmodernism chic of Far from Heaven or the parodic silliness of Die, Mommie, Die!, Kalin settles for a nondescript style whose sole function is to stay out of Moore's way." - Ed Gonzalez

Incest.

It's an enjoyable enough movie to watch, with fine performances, great camera work, and enough moments of unexpected sexual encounters - growing ever weirder as the film progresses - to keep the audience on their toes, but when the film comes to its abrupt close you realize the ultimate weakness of the film. It spends nearly all of it running time meandering about never letting us get enough insight into Tony for us to have any thoughts whatsoever about what happens at the end.

Gorgeously designed and well acted but ultimately meaningless. It gets closer to striking a note when it starts exploring its protagonist's sanity, but it's too little too late. The problem with biopics, especially when they're "torn from the headlines," is that a whole life is just too much to fit into one film; like Savage Grace, it becomes a reductive outline without any of the connective tissue that makes character drama so tasty. This probably would been more interesting as a documentary.

This movie is extremely well written, but I don't feel as if I gained any insight. I mean, it's interesting enough, but as we approach the end of the movie everybody's motives become impossible to understand. For example, why does the father steal his son's girlfriend? We understand that he does, but there's no depth there. The problem probably stems from the fact that this is a real historical event, and actual motives are unknowable, but that's no excuse.

A fine Julia Moore performance, but the movie didn't impress me much. I gotta say, though, if you like movies about crazy, nasty rich people, this is the movie for you.

Flat, but Julianne is great.