★ 7 / 10
It's a little bit long for the sole
badelf
It's a little bit long for the sole issue that the script deals with. Other than that, very well played by all the leads, and Stanley Lumet did a decent job…
It's a little bit long for the sole issue that the script deals with. Other than that, very well played by all the leads, and Stanley Lumet did a decent job with the limited material.
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★ 9 / 10
Doesn't make the mistake of glorifying crime
SnobbyDude
This is a fantastic movie. Definitely one of the 5 best I've seen in recent memory. Someone that wrote a review here felt that the two parents are placed upon…
This is a fantastic movie. Definitely one of the 5 best I've seen in recent memory. Someone that wrote a review here felt that the two parents are placed upon a pedestal by the film makers, but I don't think this is the case at all. They are accountable for their actions and know what they did was wrong. They have to pay for their actions throughout their lives and will likely turn themselves in as soon as they can be assured that their kids will be safe. The kids are the ones I feel sorry for, not the parents.
I think the main point of the movie is to make people aware of how the actions/decisions they make can hurt other people, including themselves. People often make rash decisions without thinking about the long term consequences their actions cause for themselves and other people.
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★ 9 / 10
Brilliant, warm, convincing, straight up drama with great acting
secondtake
Running on Empty First of all, what a great performance by River Phoenix. In fact, there are smart, convincing, warm performances by all the main cast. At…
Running on Empty
First of all, what a great performance by River Phoenix. In fact, there are smart, convincing, warm performances by all the main cast. At first you might feel this is a movie about a couple on the lam for a long-ago crime, and that they happened to have two kids. But really the opening of the movie, an inside view from Phoenix's character's situation, makes clear that he is the start, and the fulcrum, around which the rest of the characters swing.
So the movie ends up being an interpersonal drama, and you sympathize with everyone, even if they have done a "bad" thing. This is open to your judgement, for sure...a 1960s radical sentiment on the part of the left leaning director, Syndey Lumet, who had the early uber-classic "12 Angry Men" as well as "Serpico" and many others. It was Lumet who drew me to the film, but it was Phoenix who stole the show (and who breaks your heart knowing how young he committed suicide).
Look for the kind of classic filming and editing you'd expect from this well-schooled director. It's a warm film, and it avoids pretentiousness and artifice, turning instead to the innate abilities of the actors, including a young Marth Plimpton. Plimpton is wonderful, and she is given some classic lines, funny and perceptive just as you'd expect this kind of girl to be. (Plimpton was in another movie with Phoenix, "The Mosquito Coast," two years earlier.)
So watch this, for sure. It was nominated for a ton of awards, and overcomes what seems to be a contrived, tightly focussed impossibility of a plot and makes it work. Very well!
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