I like Michael Winterbottom. It's probably cheap to call this pretentious but it is about a filmmaker hanging around and sometimes sleeping with very beautiful women, writing a film about the Murder of the girl in the film, who has lots of interviews which producers and financiers in which he talks about what he's trying to say in the film and the structure of the film with is based on Dante's Inferno (one of Dante's books at least). I'll call it self reflexive I don't know but I'm gonna say it's about Michael Winterbottooms life and divorce (it can't be another film about Steve Coogans life). The film director (Bruhl) makes reference to him needing a hit after his last film flopped... I wondered which film that was (in real life), because I didn't think any of Winterbottoms films made money. I've always wondered how he got films funded. I like his films a lot, but I just thought it was like funding Derek Jarman, you're always gonna lose money but you'd feel good about it. Like you've done something worthwhile, but not as gay maybe. I mean I didn't think he felt pressure to make money.....I don't think this deserved to be as derided as it was. i was impressed with the accuracy to the real life case. The insanely dislikable daily mail columnist is Nick Pisa, who is insanely dislikable..The Police chief really reminded me of the actual chief and so did a lot of the cast. A lot of the seemingly small events are based on real events and are accurately portrayed. And despite me calling it pretentious I do like the self reflexive nature of this film. I think it worked and I enjoyed it more afterwards thinking about the three act structure (they talk about it in the movie) and its resolution and Cara being a sort or adopted daughter.This would be a great film to talk about over a meal, because it has depth and because it will so obviously polarise opinion, getting under some people's skin and feeling painfully obvious and other people clicking with it.I think with a semi autobiographical film like this, you're more likely to get away with a Woody Allen style approach (I.e. Comedy) and not be called pretentious and Winterbottom has done this before with 'The Trip' and 'A Cock and blah blah' and people found it easier to stomach. When you go later Woody Allen's serious stuff, you upset people. This is 'Interiors' but about a real life murder. So I can see it's pretty difficult for people to separate the art from the fact.I clicked though!

This review contains spoilers, well, sort of.. Right from the beginning we get a lot of clues, like Simone tells Thomas, 'You can't tell the truth, unless you make it a fiction', but Thomas doesn't seem to be able to separate truth from fiction completely. And a movie about a movie is a sure sign of metaphor, therefore plot events and timeline shouldn't be taken literally, especially in a dream about someone else's dreamwork. The more we learn about Thomas, the more we realize that he, rather unwittingly, is making a movie about his estranged daughter. He also believes that there is no such a thing as real truth of justice (only interpretation of it). While his antagonist Edoardo thinks that art has to provide answers to the questions that life asks; there is the truth and there is the rest. There many symbols to decipher, for instance, pairs and juxtapositions: Jessica and Elizabeth, Simone and Melanie, Joseph and Cedric, Thomas and Edoardo; Dante's La Vita Nuova vs. Divine Comedy; Thomas' daughter Bea and Dante's Beatrice; mountains vs. sea, apartments vs. hotels, Tuscany vs. Ravenna, etc. There is much more to the film than just a story of an internationally acclaimed director spiraling down the road of loneliness, gloom and despair as the result of his failure to cope with personal and creative life issues. Also, there is a heavy hint that the murder of Jessica was either ritualistic or conspiratorial, involving many participants, and we'll never be able to learn the true motives or reconstruct the chain of events that led to it, let alone see justice administered. So, what's the point then? And here it is in a nutshell: reality is what we make by constantly construing actual and imaginative objects and meanings, – notions that morph into one another. And Thomas chooses to see the bright side of things - light, as opposed to darkness, love, as opposed to hate, life, as opposed to death, simple, as opposed to complicated..

Kate Beckinsale easily has the face of an Angel (well Duh! She probably is one). But let's leave my biased view of Kate on the side, because this apparently is based on a real life case. Which I had not idea going into. And maybe it helped my viewing experience that I didn't. Because while I see all the negative reviews here (after watching the movie), I couldn't relate.There are many weird things in this and it may be too sexual for some, but I do think it brings its point home: Which is the current state of journalism. It's not so much about the actual story, but about how the media reacts to stuff like that. So if you go into this knowing that or at least being open minded, you might be entertained too

Only one-thirds into the movie did I realize what it was supposed to be: a multi-layered, poetic piece with lofty characters. I should've gotten the hint from the opening scene and the narrative prose throughout the movie. Unfortunately it all ended up as too pretentious and cannot even be filed under the pool of psychological thrillers.It's got a lot of lost potential; we've got some good actors caught in their bad moments, as if they couldn't afford another take. It was difficult to empathize with any of the characters. Eventually I got tired of watching Thomas (Daniel Brühl) going on impulsive snog fests with Simone and sniff cocaine because god knows why... it's hard to figure out what kind of character he's supposed to be. The only two characters true-to-form were Edoardo (Valerio Mastandrea) and Melanie (Cara Delevingne), and I'd have to give a special mention to Delevingne mostly for actually doing well in her first speaking part in a feature film.