Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

jack-upland The worst part of this is the story, which rapidly deteriorates from a partly promising premise to an abysmal end. Rather than making the main plot more interesting, the subplot involving Charles Dickens renders the narrative nonsensical. I think I know why those famous actors and actresses were involved: they are hacks who could sleepwalk through their parts and have been involved in enough good films that the occasional putrid offering doesn't matter. There could have been a good film in this, involving modern and Dickensian London, but that would involve an intelligent writer, which this script utterly lacked. The real "riddle" is why such a uninspired and uninspiring story idea ever was made into a film...

shiloh58au I didn't know anything about this DVD when I hired it. Had a quick look here at the comments but decided to keep an open mind. Obviously an independent film and low budget but that didn't worry me. I will watch anything with Derick Jacobi and as always he played his part well. What a pity no one else did. I had watched 'Atonement' a few weeks ago with Vanessa Redgrave and she was sublime. In this she seemed to just turn up to read the lines. In my opinion the main mistake was in casting Vinnie Jones. To be honest I saw his picture on the DVD cover but didn't notice that he got top billing. A sticker was strategically placed over his name! It was watchable and I quite liked the Dickens story alongside present day. Maybe with a more capable actor playing the lead this might have worked better. Still it was weak.

mikebesant This movie must have looked when it was being pitched at development stage and getting a Redgrave and a Jacobi on board must have excited the money men. All I can say is that they clearly did not have anything on that week. Jacobi camps it up in the way that only Jacobi can do and I thought that he seemed to more of the actor that he parodied in his cameo role in Frasier a few years back. Vinnie Jones is not exactly bad, he is just clearly out of his depth as a leading man. He is really quite amiable throughout and if this was a pilot for a TV series, it may have just got picked up. However, the scipt and the camera work were appalling. Quite why this "jounalist" and a press officer from the Met would ever work together is never explained. It certainly cannot have been because of the sexual chemistry, of which there is none. There is nothing wrong with a ridiculous and far fetched plot that you can pass off as original, but the whole thing is just so contrived that the two stories just do not make sense at all. It was like two stories confusingly edited in to one just to make up two hours. Go watch some paint dry for a couple of hours. You life will be more fulfilled than watching this rubbish

indioblack117 It doesn't surprise me that the makers of this hopeless movie couldn't find a UK distributor, and then had to release it as a free DVD with a Sunday newspaper. The distributors could clearly see what the film-makers and the Sunday newspaper couldn't, that this was one movie that just wasn't going to recoup its costs.Since it's a thriller about riddles, it would have helped if they'd picked a lead actor who could enunciate properly, rather than the mumbling Vinnie Jones who appears to pronounce "riddle" as "riell". And it would have helped if the dialogue hadn't been swamped by noisy locations or scenes flooded with distracting and inappropriate music. The plot is ludicrous: The lost Charles Dickens story supposedly helps our hero solve a series of modern murders, but so would a copy of Herge's Adventures Of Tintin, since the link between Dickens and Jones is more non-existent than tenuous. And we have the ridiculous premise that a would-be investigative journalist who lays his hands on a previously undiscovered Dickens manuscript, would take several days to read it, just so that flashbacks to Dickens can continue to be played throughout the movie, as if they had some connection to it. Which they don't. I mean, if you found a new Dickens manuscript, wouldn't you just go somewhere quiet and read it ? The film ends with one of those surprise revelations that have become mandatory since The Sixth Sense, but in this case it doesn't so much surprise you as insult your intelligence. If the film is suddenly going to turn supernatural at the twelfth hour, then revealing that Vinnie Jones is a robot might have been more acceptable. It might not have seemed so turgid if the film had been stylish, but it isn't. And in several places it appears decidedly amateur: There's a scene where a table is laid with a 60's jump-cut technique, but they haven't made sure that the person actually laying the table is completely out of frame between the cuts. Consequently, you can see things changing at the edge of frame, when you're really supposed to be watching things changing at the centre of frame. A good rule in movie-making is: If you don't understand how to do a technique then try something else.The real riddle is why anyone thought it would be a good idea to make this movie in the first place.