Myriam Nys The movie is lifted above the average by a fine performance by Mrs. Farrow, who is deeply moving as a mother devastated by loss and guilt. Her performance turns the movie into a chillingly accurate portrayal of grief and loneliness : here is a woman whose life has turned into a desert, complete with maddening mirages.If one subtracts Mrs. Farrow from the movie, then "Full Circle" becomes a well-crafted horror movie of the more subtle and psychological kind : it's pretty decent, but nothing stratospheric. Its credibility was somewhat undermined by the remarkable ease with which the protagonist succeeded in piecing together a long-buried story of woe : she constantly meets the right people pointing in the right direction, at the right moment. In my experience, people who try to reconstruct old stories, especially old stories involving crime and injustice, are more likely to meet interlocutors threatening to flatten their faces with the aid of a tire iron. And if they do happen upon a benevolent and helpful witness, they'll soon discover that human memory is as riddled with holes as a slice of Swiss cheese. ("Yes, I remember Mrs. Watson from Number 18, she had three sons - no wait, two sons and a daughter, the little daughter had infantile cancer, she died in 1957 or 1960, the poor kid was killed in a car accident, her eldest brother was called Shirley and he became a policeman after his two sisters died in an airplane disaster in the Belgian Congo. Mr. Watson was a criminal - he once tried to kill the Queen with a cauliflower - but Mrs. Watson was a decent Christian woman, she kept all five of her sons on the straight and narrow. Nowadays they all live in Independence Street, with the exception of Pamela Snowdon, who married a Greek astronaut.")Still, it's a pleasure to watch a movie which relies on a careful creation of an uncanny atmosphere, rather than on acres of gore.

Rainey Dawn The movie is a good film. Nothing wrong with the film but I think they dragged it out to much in the beginning with Julia moving, her new boyfriend (or whoever he is) and her soon to be ex-husband, barely any ghost stuff going on etc... even after the seance it dragged on to long. Then it became this film about Julia trying to find out who the kids are the medium talked about because she bought the house and found it highly important to know. Julia tracks down the people that used to live in the same house and their kids died there.This is basic ghost/haunting story without a lot of ghosts - really it is because it's more about Julia's husband and boyfriend plus her tracking down the people of the dead ghost kids.6/10

Johan Louwet Well I haven't seen too many movies starring Mia Farrow. Her most famous role is probably as Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby in which she performed greatly. It was a pleasant surprise to see her in the main role. 9 years later she doesn't seem to have aged much. And here she also carries the movie. And again it revolves around a child of hers. Trying to get over the loss of her daughter Julia leaves her husband and goes to live on her own. What she doesn't know is that the house holds a dark secret. She starts to see visions of a girl that looks a lot like her own daughter. As she is trying to reveal this mystery with the help of people knowing bits of info about the past inhabitants of the house, bad things start to happen to people around her. I must have missed a few things as I didn't understand Julia's actions sometimes. Reading some opinions here it's more clear to me now and I must applaud the writer for it's cleverness. It's based on a book which probably explains things a bit better than the movie. Very overlooked which it really shouldn't be.

Michael_Elliott The Haunting of Julia (1977) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Mia Farrow plays Julia Lofting, a woman suffering from depression after her daughter choked to death on an apple. After being released from a hospital Julia decides to leave her husband and buy a house on her own where she just sits around crying over her loss but soon a vengeful ghost starts to visit her. THE HAUNTING OF JULIA appears to have quite a few fans and while the opening thirty-minutes are great the film quickly falls apart and runs out of fresh ideas. I've heard that the novel by Peter Straub is actually very good and I think it's clear that something has been lost from the page to the screen. I say that because the film starts off as your typical ghost story but then it starts to branch off to other murders and other visions. Several supporting characters are introduced and before you know it the "story" has gotten much bigger yet it never really goes anywhere. The first thirty-minutes, as I said, are great and then the next twenty or so minutes features non-stop scenes of Farrow either crying or having someone telling her to move on in life. These scenes really start to repeat themselves and I think some of them should have just been taken out. The final twenty-five minutes are when all hell breaks loose and it just seems too uneven and messy for its own good. Farrow offers up an excellent performance as the grieving mother and there's not a single frame where you won't believe that she's this character. The supporting players are also fine even though none of them are given a great role. The film's greatest moment is the first scene where we get a very dramatic and chilling account of the child's death. I think any parent will really be shaken by this sequence, which is brilliantly directed and the impact is certainly felt. It's just too bad that the rest of the film didn't contain as much power.