The Beguiled

Absolutely beautiful. The characters felt real and genuine. It was amazing to see the stereotypical southern belle behave in such a sinister way. I came here because I wanted multidimensional characters, and that's exactly what I got. Spoiler warning: I do want to add something in light of the interesting reviews from what I think are confused viewers: this is a story about women, by a woman. It's going to be told from a woman's perspective. In my interpretation it's about the misconceptions of women, particularly southern bells in the 19th century, and how the women used it to their credit for good, and for evil. It's about the complicated relationships that men have with women, again particularly in the 19th century. I love this movie because the characters behaved true to form. If they started acting violently over-the-top it wouldn't make any sense. The point is, if your view of true violence is limited to gore and bludgeoning, you will miss the entire point of this movie. Take from that what you will.

I normally love every film that Nicole Kidman is in, but this was very disappointing. I work in the film industry and this film was fairly bad on many levels. It seemed as though they couldn't afford a lighting technician and the storyline just drags unlike the older version of 'The Beguiled' with Clint Eastwood. The performances were, sadly puerile.

The trailer made this movie look really interesting but it wasn't at all. I can appreciate a slow moving story but this one had zero character development. It just didn't seem necessary to make it drag on for so long. It was pretty obvious what direction things were moving and you could easily guess what would happen next because it took forever for anything to actually happen. It was a great cast of talented actresses but there weren't really any good scenes. It just dragged on and I figured I'd invested so much time that I might as well finish the movie. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it in the theater.