SanEat A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Raymond Sierra The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

alwelcomesyou I discovered this film a few years ago and since then it has become a firm favourite; its a very easy film to watch and in quiet times I find myself going back to watch this.The plot focuses on May-Alice Culhane a successful soap-opera who is struck in New York leaving her without the ability to walk. This event prompts her to leave her high flying life in New York, to return to the area she grew up in. Here, she faces an identity crisis having lost her freedom and her career. The film explores May-Alice's experience of such a loss the emotional trauma is brilliantly portrayed by Mary McDonnell and her nomination for this film is well deserved. Overall the film is about coping with trauma and who a person becomes after such an experience. The ending is quite open and that perhaps symbolizes the uncertainty of May-Alice and Chantelle's future.

secondtake Passion Fish (1992)I wish I could like John Sayles films more. They want to be so important and serious, about exceptional people in normal working America. Characters are dying to be felt for and understood, and the turns of events are poignant in simple ways we can relate to.So it is with Passion Fish, with a couple changes. For the first long part of the movie the main character, an ex-soap opera star recently made paraplegic, is completely unlikable. But eventually we come to appreciate her attitude, and other characters arrive, namely a nurse who can stick it out with her.So if all this sounds good, it is. But the writing is a little off, a little wrong, all the way through. Occasionally it's just a strain (I laughed out loud a couple times at it, not with it). There's not problem with the subjects and what they do, but what they say, a hair off key from what such real people would say. Or that's the sense you get. And the filming is adequate without being magical, or emphatic, or whatever it is that great movies pull off. The camera-work, the editing, the clunky addition of sounds, it's all a little crude, as if it didn't matter that it was just functional and used a few cheap devices (like a little montage sequence with snippets dissolving one into another like a sentimental ad). In fact, it has a television quality even though Sayles has never done t.v. as far as I know.If you are really into content, though, and real people with real problems, none of this will matter as much. And the compensations include gritty acting, which makes the most of the dialog. If this lack of style is your style, you'll like it. If you want formal intentions of any kind you might think it's slow and unartful.

evanston_dad Mary McDonnell had a brief spate of success in films in the early 1990s before disappearing from the scene and reemerging recently on the television series "Battlestar Galactica." First she came to major attention in "Dances with Wolves," for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, and then she graduated to the lead category in 1992 for her performance in "Passion Fish." McDonnell gives a lovely performance as a bratty soap opera actress who's confined to a wheelchair after an accident, and who must rely on a no-nonsense nurse (Alfre Woodard, lovely as well) for help. The film follows all of the requisite trajectories you'd expect from a movie like this, and the fish that give the film its name serve a heavy-handed symbolic purpose that seemed too much for me even at the time (and I was only seventeen). But the film does have a relaxed indie vibe to it, and I can see why people like it.Grade: B+

ejwells Writer/Director John Sayles' 1992 outing tells the tale of a soap opera star (Mary McDonell), who's been in a car accident, and is now wheelchair bound, and her unlikely friendship with her live-in nurse (Alfre Woodard). Excellent supporting roles from the great David Strathairn (A Sayles fave, star of Limbo), Vondie Curtis-Hall (who went on to direct Gridlock'd), and Angela Bassett. I gotta say this. Sayles always writes believable characters, and his dialogue is amongst the best in filmdom. I knew my wife would like this, which was my main motivation for renting it. I'd seen it before, but had forgotten just how good it is. McDonell garnered a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her role in this largely overlooked gem. 4 (of 5) stars on this one.