0isin reilly This film is touching in so many levels as it deals with so many issues including life ,death and everything in-between. I am not going to spoil anything so I am just going to say that it is about a young boy growing up in an old people's home and a man living there dealing with his regrets. All the cast were wonderful but especially David Morrissey and Michael Cain. I think this is one of Michael Cain's greatest performance to date but lets not forget about Bill Milner and Anna Maria Duff who also gave great performances. The chemistry between Michael Cain and Bill Milner was very good and really does make the film the heart-warming comedy- drama that it is. A wonderful film that I would highly recommend to anyone.

secondtake Is Anybody There? (2008)Yes, this is a sentimental even sappy movie, with clichés of old man befriending young boy and both of them growing and changing as a result. But there is so much done right here, so much magic and sincerity throughout, and such good acting by the two leads, it's hard to fault it. It's like having a wonderful carmel apple and saying it wasn't good, you've had one before.Michael Caine is the headliner, and he's 75 at the time of filming, both looking and acting his age. That's not a marvel in itself, exactly, but it's admirable, though for Michael Caine, who acts more than he breathes, it was to be expected. At the other end of this spectrum is the young boy, played by Bill Milner, who is 13 at the time, very smart, subtle, and rather complex for a kid. The background to it all is an old folks home of an old-fashioned sort, charming and simple, a big old house in the country where a handful of aging but still ambulatory sorts keep going one way or another. I don't suppose it's a common thing these days (though it's set in Britain, and I don't have a clue about that, really), but it really seems like a perfect way to spend some waning years if you don't have family, or a vacation home in Arizona, to turn to. They don't have much, but they have each other, and director John Crowley (who did "A Boy") keeps the sentimentality in check without avoiding the true joy of some of the encounters. Caine's character, Clarence, was once a magician, and Milner's character, Edward, is interested in the paranormal. The two naturally overlap, though Clarence makes clear with growing emotional pain that there is no other world than this transient one and that Edward is wasting his time. Edward sees magic as something other worldly and gradually leans the reality of magic, that it's about illusion. Then, as time goes on between the two (and it isn't always sweet, but it's always tender), a new kind of illusion grows in the mind of the old man, and the other world takes on a third meaning, and a useful one to take care of some of his angst.I suppose this is a film with too much feel good warmth and forced complexity (forced in the family members who run the old folks home, mostly) to work for some viewers. But if you can be uncynical in the least, and enjoy something simple and heartfelt, tinged with the depths of dying and old age, watch this one. It swept me away.

paul2001sw-1 This disappointing film about the unlikely friendship between a boy and an old man is ultimately disappointing precisely because it is not so unlikely; at least, it feels to be following in a well-worn dramatic rut. The tone is uneven, trying at times for poignancy and at others, playing for sitcom-style laughs. What's interesting in a way is that it feels like a period story: it's set in the 1980s, but has something of the same feel to its construction as dramas usually set in an earlier period, with their carefully recreated portraits of times less affluent; I must be growing old to get the same vibes off a story set in a past that I remember. But you don't say anything profound about the 80s by giving one of your characters a mullet haircut, and overall, there's an absence of intensity here, just a collection of set piece scenes that don't really hang together.

linnet100 I had great hopes for this film, but we both decided to go to be 2/3rds of the way through. The cast was excellent, but therein lies part of the problem. Many of the cameo roles lampooned the characteristics of those they sought to portray, in the most grotesquely unsubtle manner. Michael Caine was his usual self, but the irascibility made him too un-redeeming. One looked for likability, and found it cloaked. Which rather describes the whole film. In the end the the excessive morbidity swamps the film. It becomes little more than a self-indulgent lampoon of growing old.There are better examples of the genre, often with much more acute and perceptive humour - something the subject matter badly requires, but which this film sadly lacked.