kalyan-srinivas What an excellent movie, the story and the performances are top notch and cannot be compared to any other Hollywood movie till date. I loved every part of this movie. The background score and the showing the past in black and white made the movie more intense. I generally don't review the Hollywood movies although I watched tons of them but THIS is the real deal I was expecting from Hollywood. I cannot speak as why this is very much underrated but this is a movie of life. I am out of words! The movies on past lives are rare and I was afraid that this one also goes on the same cliché route on the past lives i.e the person in the present life is same as the past life with same face but it did not..So relaxing to watch this beautiful Hollywood gem. Of all the tons of Hollywood movies I watched, I am now rating this as #1 of all time!Regards Kalyan Srinivas K

vincentlynch-moonoi This sounded like a really good movie for me. A mystery. Reincarnation mixed in. Three really fine actors. What could go wrong? Well, it depends on how one likes a film mystery to progress. There really are 2 styles -- setting out the basics of the mystery early on and then letting the viewer in on the resolution...OR...keep the viewer in the dark, allowing him to see just one clue at a time and then resolve the film in the last few minutes. I'm a fan of the former style, but this film is of the latter style. So it was not until almost 90 minutes into the film -- when we got the key clue -- that I really began to enjoy and appreciate this film. A better film would have sprinkled some of these clues earlier on in the film. And the ending is a humdinger! Kenneth Branagh is good here. Emma Thompson is really good. But, at least for me, Derek Jacobi (as a psychic) really steals the show! So for me, you've got a D film for the first hour, then an A film the last half hour. Comes out to a C (7).

Lechuguilla In this splendid psychological thriller, a murder from the past haunts a present day woman named Grace, wonderfully played by Emma Thompson. And a cocky private detective named Mike Church (Kenneth Branagh) tries to help her make sense of her personal nightmare. It's a murder mystery with twists within twists overlain with a Gothic, operatic tone.Set in Los Angeles, the clever script weaves two separate stories, one from the late 1940s, shown in B&W, and the other from the current day, shown in color. This alternating B&W and color keeps the two strands separate and therefore easy to follow. The film opens with tantalizing newspaper accounts of a 1949 murder; the victim; the probable killer (an opera composer), and related headlines such as "Alibi Questioned", "Composer's Prints Found On Scissors", "Housekeeper Testifies", and so on.Most scenes are jam-packed with information, including exposition and character traits. Clues to the murder are wonderfully subtle. A pair of sharp scissors figures into the outcome. The 1940s segment contains a melodramatic costume party. Humor augments the serious subject matter. The plot is so dense that it can be a tad confusing, which is my only real complaint. Owing to the story's complexity, the ending goes on for some 24 minutes.Visuals are terrific. I especially liked the B&W segments, slightly grainy with noir overhead and side lighting. Prod design and costumes in both periods are elaborate, detailed, and highly believable.Casting is fine, overall; Robin Williams is perfectly cast. Acting ranges from very good to outstanding. Actor Derek Jacobi does a great job as a light, campy hypnotist with a penchant for finding cheap antiques. Consistent with the operatic theme, the music is mostly melodramatic and serious which compounds the story's Gothic intensity.The viewer needs to pay attention, else be lost in confusion. The underlying puzzle can be solved but the solution surprised me. Except for a bit too much complexity, this is a wonderful film. I plan to watch it again.

Robert J. Maxwell Well, I guess it's not really "karmic" revenge. It's just plain revenge behind the murder.Whoever wrote this piece of confusing comic/mystery/melodrama was channeling Madame Blavatsky, who apparently emerges from time to time from behind the veil of Isis.There was a scissors murder in 1948. A composer (Branagh) was executed for the murder of his wife (Thompson). Somehow, a reporter (Garcia) seems to have been involved but he's just a red herring. Forget him.Anyway, it's now forty years later, 1988 that is, and Emma Thompson is an amnesiac taken in by Branagh because she has no identity and nowhere to go. A hypnotist and antique dealer insinuates his way into the relationship that, as the sophisticated viewer will have already guessed, has turned physically demonstrative. The hypnotist age regresses Thompson and she begins reliving the 1948 case in which she was the victim.Branagh, a fundamentally decent guy, consults Robin Williams, an ex shrink who now runs a Carniceria. (This is Los Angeles.) Williams explains all about karma to Branagh and advises him to kill Thompson before she kills him. The two are reliving the 1948 murder only the genders are reversed.But Williams is a red herring too. The whole business about karma is a red herring. And at the end, when the villain tries to murder Thompson with a pair of antique scissors -- hint, hint -- that's a lot of baloney too because Thompson has no connection with the earlier murder, as far as it's possible to tell. She just happens to be a lady who lost her memory and came up with these weird stories under hypnosis.What a fine cast. Kenneth Branagh looks young and innocent but isn't really convincing in this relatively light part. I haven't seen his renditions of Shakespeare. Emma Thompson is a splendid actress and looks very appealing without being in the least sultry and certainly not Hollywood gorgeous. She has the open, wide-eyed, innocent features of a loving pet dog, some kind of miniature. Not a poodle, though. More like a happy-go-lucky terrier, one of those pets that's always wagging its tail and has its tongue hanging out of its mouth, maybe poised and hoping you'll toss a tennis ball. Andy Garcia has sleek features, is an underused performer, and should choose his parts more carefully. All of them live in those pretentious mansions of Southern California except for Jacobi and his dear mother, who are consigned to one of those cluttered little spaces out of Dickens' "The Old Curiosity Shop." If anyone can make sense out of this underlighted mish mosh, will he please let me know? I need some hints too, you know.