The Edge of Love (2008)
Average Rating: 5.1/10
Reviews Counted: 57
Fresh: 20 | Rotten: 37
Despite effective performances from Knightley and Miller, The Edge of Love lacks a coherent narrative.
Average Rating: 4.4/10
Critic Reviews: 18
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 14
Despite effective performances from Knightley and Miller, The Edge of Love lacks a coherent narrative.
liked it
Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 53,392
Movie Info
The Jacket director John Maybury adapts playwright Sharman MacDonald's account of the true-life relationships shared between Welsh poet Dylan Thomas; his wife, Caitlin; his lifelong friend Vera Phillips; and her husband, William Killick, in this biographical drama centering on the curious incident in which Thomas found his home turned into a war zone when Phillips and Killick attacked the abode with a machine gun and a grenade. Sienna Miller assumes the role of Dylan's wife, Caitlin, and Keira
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Cast
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Keira Knightley
Vera Phillips -
Sienna Miller
Caitlin MacNamara -
Matthew Rhys
Dylan Thomas -
Cillian Murphy
William Killick -
Simon Armstrong
Wilfred Hosgood -
Ben Batt
Sergeant -
Geoffrey Beevers
Registrar -
Rachel Bell
Midwife -
Paul Brooke
Mr. Justice Singleton -
Huw Ceredig
John Patrick -
Richard Clifford
Alistair Graham -
Anne Lambton
Anita Shenkin -
Lisa Stansfield (II)
Ruth Williams -
Nick Stringer
PC Williams -
Suggs
The Crooner -
Camilla Rutherford
Nicolette -
Alastair Mackenzie
Anthony Devas -
Ray Llewellyn
Dewi Ianthe -
Jonny Phillips
John Eldridge -
Richard Dillane
Lt. Col. David Talbot R... -
Simon Kassianides
Partisan -
Rachel Essex
Mel -
Neville Malcolm
Big Joe
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All Critics (61) | Top Critics (18) | Fresh (20) | Rotten (37) | DVD (7)
The Edge of Love is literate and often lovely to look at, but unless you're requesting an off-key bohemian rhapsody, do not go gentle into that good theater.
Top CriticThe Edge of Love holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.
This may be Knightley's first truly mature performance. Too bad it arrives wrapped in doggerel.
For all its vivid evocation of its characters' tomorrow-we-die bonhomie, the film finally never quite convinces viewers of its central subject: the sisterly, almost sapphic bond between Vera and Caitlin.
The movie makes for an engaging enough period piece.
While Thomas fans will regret seeing their literary hero reduced to a generic drunk, even those awaiting the aforementioned bathtub scene will find it barely worth the effort.
[Knightley & Miller] frolicking on the beach ... could easily be a couple of models from a Boden fashion shoot at play.
When it's over...we have to wonder why any of it mattered in the first place.
Maybury tackles the great Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love, a speculative investigation into a cloudy period of the poet and dramatist's personal life. [Blu-ray]
click for full review
Ah, the London Blitz. Bombs falling, buildings on fire, people dying all around. Good times, good times.
Unfortunately, like the murky visuals, the story is also muddled.
A bit too arty and concerned with quasi-historical detail to catch fire as a romance (doomed or otherwise), and too yawningly familiar in its major chord plotting to set sail as a honest character ensemble.
While all the pieces are there for an intriguing film, John Maybury's The Edge of Love never really becomes anything.
Though very uneven in style and focus . . . the fraught complications among the foursome raise universal issues of freewheeling young love and friendship during wartime.
The picture's combination of stylistic splash and pretentious turgidity makes for a long slog. It may be accurate, but by the time it drags to an end, you won't really care.
A period romance, charged with provocative undercurrents about art, war and the eternal battle of the sexes.
More a Gary Springer sex brawl than a Blitzkrieg bohemian romp, with Dylan mainly playing incorrigibly horny and urinating on house plants. And a court duel from nowhere, with the entire free love posse nastily at each other's throats. Paging Nancy Grace.
Audience Reviews for The Edge of Love
Super Reviewer
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- Dylan Thomas: Not for the proud man apart from the raging moon I write on the spendthrift pages, nor for the towering dead with their nightingales and psalms, but for the lovers, their arms round the griefs of the ages.
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- Vera Phillips: You don't even see me, do you? Dylan! All you've got is stories in your head. Words. And I have to feel real. William... makes me real.
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- Dylan Thomas: I do it, sleep with other women... because I'm a poet, and a poet feeds off life.
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Movie: ID: 770684231 Title: The Edge of Love Release Date: 2008-05-15 00:00:00.0 MPAA: 4 Status: 1
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Foreign Titles
- Edge of Love - Was von der Liebe bleibt (DE)
- En el límite del amor (ES)
Then I found out she sang her own songs! Well, color me impressed. Those musical numbers are easily the best parts of the movie. The twisted love...parallelogram is too subtle, too full of wist. There isn't much development on how exactly Vera and Caitlin become besties, what exactly went on between Dylan and Vera, why William becomes so disturbed.