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Eye of the Beholder (1999)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 85
Fresh: 8
Rotten:77
Average Rating: 3.4/10
Consensus: Improbable and muddled.
Runtime: 1 hr 41 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis:
Eye of the Beholder is a startling journey into obsession, the story of an intelligence agent so taken with a beautiful killer he cannot bear to apprehend her. Set in the surreal world of a...
Eye of the Beholder is a startling journey into obsession, the story of an intelligence agent so taken with a beautiful killer he cannot bear to apprehend her. Set in the surreal world of a high-tech voyeur, the tale follows him across the country as he embarks on a desperate quest for this enigmatic femme fatale.
Ewan McGregor stars as The Eye, a lonely, isolated British intelligence agent who has lost his wife and daughter, for which he blames his own unforgivable inaction. Yet detachment is part of the job.
The Eye's current mission is to track Joanna Eris (Ashley Judd), a woman suspected of blackmailing the son of a senior British official. But Eris is far more than a blackmailer. She is a seductive, shadowy master of disguises, a frenzied murderer, a lost orphan and an abject mystery whose rage is as fierce as her beauty.
The Eye cannot help but be fascinated by Joanna - especially when a surveillance photo of her seems to reveal the ghostly image of his long-lost daughter, whose absence haunts him. In his deepest fantasies, their two fates as lost souls are somehow connected. As he follows Joanna from murder to murder, the more The Eye finds that he needs to watch her. Not capture her. Not speak to her. But watch her, becoming inexorably more and more obsessed with what he sees. He shadows Joanna without ever letting her know he is there - except that sometimes unexpected turns of fate make it seem as if she has a guardian angel watching over her.
But the closer The Eye gets to Joanna's life, the more dangerous his fantasy becomes. Soon he begins to meddle in her existence, taking action, altering her fate. Yet to catch her would be to lose her, something The Eye cannot allow again in his life. So the odyssey continues . . . until the pursuer and the pursued find themselves on a perilous crash course.
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ashley Judd, Patrick Bergin, K.D. Lang
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Ashley Judd, Patrick Bergin, K.D. Lang, Ann-Marie Brown, Jason Priestley, Geneviève Bujold, Charles Powell
Director: Stephan Elliott
Director: Stephan Elliott
Screenwriter: Stephan Elliott
Producer: Nicholas Clermont, Tony Smith
Composer: Marius De Vries
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Reviews for Eye of the Beholder
As misogynistic as anything I've seen in ages, it's tricked up with enough fancy cinematography (by Guy Dufaux) to guarantee it sub-Hitchcockian credentials of the sort that some reviewers eagerly hand out to Brian De Palma.
Remove the directorial flash and filigree, and its narrative would be easier to track.
It's not good when you check your watch every 20 minutes during a 107-minute movie. It's bad when you think, "Yeaahh, rrright" almost as often.
During one scene, some characters take a break by watching a video of Roger Corman's great 1960 The Wasp Woman. I suggest you do the same.
On the bright side, I only lost an hour and half of my life watching this piece of [expletive deleted], unlike those involved in the making of it, who lost months.
As if to make up for the disjointed quality of the story, director Elliott has incorporated various themes into the film, such as the repetitive use of snow globes, angel statues, and astrology... Unfortunately, these things only pretty up a bad picture.
McGregor's and Judd's attentive, focused performances never allow their characters to become lost in Elliott's fractured, virtual America.
Unfortunately, Elliott’s latest effort contained too many blanks for me to fill in.
If you took five different jigsaw puzzles, threw the pieces together on a table top and spent two hours trying to make a cohesive picture, you might end up with something along the lines of this.
Eye of the Holder makes you wonder how bad are the scripts that Ashley Judd and Ewan McGregor turn down.
It's late January, winter is entrenched, and in the lull between the bounty of Christmas and the renewal of spring, the big screen can sometimes seem barren -- a movable famine.
The film maintains its story perfectly from the beginning, creating a gorgeous atmosphere and layering the story with hints of thriller, mystery, romance and psychological drama.
Moving at the pace of blood through the veins, "Beholder" has the power to alter time, making an hour forty-five seem like three.
Latest News for Eye of the Beholder
July 05, 2005:
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