VeteranLight I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Richie-67-485852 You will be entertained and that is the primary force here. Paul Newman and Sally field along with supporting characters guarantee this. To further it along it is a good story to tell and brings up a favorite subject for reporters and those that hate them. They argue that whatever they do is allowed and the counter to it is no matter who gets hurt? The truth decides or is supposed to but what if it is slanted? Not complete? Tune in and find out how both scenarios play out. There will be...

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU That is not the best of all films about crime in Miami: we are still a long way from Dexter. There is no real suspense since the person who disappeared six months earlier is not found and the person responsible for his disappearance is not identified either. In fact we have a completely different film than a real criminal investigation.Some police force, or rather one person, a prosecutor, using that police force decides to target a man who apparently has nothing to do with any real crime, just because his father was a mafia bootlegger, so out of spite and with the intend to . . . and that's just the point: reveal a criminal? But Mr. policeman is acting on a hunch, not real evidence and then later on even without the necessary warrant to tap the phones of the concerned person. So he leaks a file in the first part of this investigation, and then his direct subordinate leaks the file in the second part of the investigation that has actually become totally illegal after the DA had declared it closedIn that net a 34 year old journalist finds herself trapped between hurting people and promoting her career, under the guidance of an editor who will get her off the case when the department of justice gets his big nose in the imbroglio. She hurts a lot of people actually. She even causes the suicide of one person. And that person had told her clearly enough that she couldn't take the publicity of her abortion. But she quoted her name nevertheless. The man who is targeted just plays back and settles his own accounts with the DA and the police force that is concerned here. He manages to ruin the reputation of the DA and to ruin the career of the cop. And then he sells his house, and business I guess, and sails to the North East, leaving the girl behind and with no promise that he would answer if she wrote and no request on her part for him to write.The acting is OK but the plot is slightly easy and the absence of malice is definitely not true of the cop who wants to hurt the man, Michael Gallagher by the way, out of pure vanity; nor of Gallagher once he decides to settle these accounts. The only one who has no intent to hurt anyone is the poor journalist but she is absolutely naïve and unconscious since she causes one suicide. Irresponsible, it is called in my book of ethics.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

tieman64 A reversal of "All The President's Men", Sydney Pollack's "Absence of Malice" sees an overzealous prosecutor leaking information to a young reporter (Sally Field). The leak involves Michael Gallagher (Paul Newman), a liquor wholesaler whose father had a criminal past and mob affiliations. When Field publishes her story, which implicates Gallagher in the murder of a unionist, Gallagher challenges her. He believes he was unfairly slandered.Unlike "All the President's Man", which saw valiant media-men carving through lies and half truths to get at facts (thereby rightfully exposing and incriminating), "Absence of Malice" thus does the opposite. Here, journalists and prosecutors trade in lies, half-truths and skirt around laws. Meanwhile, the film's victims are innocent businessmen who are wrongly accused of bullying unions. The film's title refers to a by-law which essentially allows journalists to "do wrong" if they can sufficiently prove that they harboured no ill intentions.Like most of Pollack's films, "Malice" is overlong, simply shot and drags.7/10 – Worth one viewing.

Robert J. Maxwell It's not a bad movie, not insulting to the intelligence or pandering to the glands, and it deals with matters of some ethical importance, but, man, it's murky stuff.Sally Field, cute and pixyish as ever, is a newspaper reporter in Miami. She's not particularly ambitious but she's responsible and feels that the public has the right to know whatever she herself knows.An unscrupulous local law-enforcement officer, Bob Balaban, decides to harass Paul Newman, bootlegger's son but innocent of any wrongdoing, in connection with the disappearance of a union organizer. In an interview with Field, Balaban leaves a folder containing the case against Newman conspicuously on his desk, then tells Fields he's going away and she should make herself at home. It's an invitation to read some documents that the law forbids him to reveal.Complications ensue. There is a death that results from Field's honest but ruthless reporting. And things gets really confusing -- I HOPE -- because somewhere along the line I found myself leaping around blindly in all directions trying to follow the plot.The jactitations reminded me of something else -- all my home theater equipment. See, the units themselves -- the DVD and tape players, the amplifier -- they're all black. So are the buttons. And so is much of the tiny printing. In the subdued lighting of the vast living room here in the trailer I call home, you can't see or read the buttons or the print. You know why? I'll tell you why. Because the whole Geschaft was designed by a bunch of moss-covered technicians in a brightly lighted room with all the equipment on eye-level shelves. They can read all the details of the black print on the black face plate and interpret all of the complicated carbuncles on the rear. Fine in a laboratory, a headache at home.I had the same feeling about this plot, with all its criss-crossing motives and correlated conundrums. The writers and the director -- Sidney Pollack, whose work I admire -- and the script doctors must have gone over the story multiple times until they had all the rip currents memorized. Then they plunged ahead with a story that makes Raymond Chandler look like a model of expositional clarity.And frankly Paul Newman, another whose work elsewhere I've admired, is no help. When he doesn't sink his teeth into a role, nothing much comes of his performance, and with the exception of one scene that's the case here. Sally Field is okay, cute thing that she is. The best performance, perhaps, is Melinda Dillon's as the pathetic, weak school principal. At least she gets to go crazy, running from lawn to lawn in her nightgown, trying to pick up every newspaper on every front yard in the city of Miami. Next best performance: Bob Balaban as the unflappable slime ball who starts the whole tale.It's too bad so much was lost. Journalistic ethics have become more important an issue now than they were when this film was released -- a few years after the wildly successful "All The President's Men." Newspapers have the time and resources for in-depth reportage, in a way that even 24/7 cable news channels do not. They maintain permanent bureaus in places like Madrid, even when nothing is going on. They have facilities to investigate more than sexual peccadilloes. Lamentably, the way things are going we will be left with two newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And after that? Sixty-second sound bites to be played over and over, and hour-long opinion journalists telling us what think the sound bites meant.