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From my favorite movies..

Excellent but underrated film

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

I love Cate Blanchett. She is quite the looker, my friend. If you didn't know this from watching Cate in her movies that she's oh so beautiful and oh so intelligent then you have no precognitive psychic capability at all, or cognitive sensibility for that matter. The Gift has a special cast - Blanchett, Reeves, Holmes, Kinnear, Ribisi, Swank. I really love all these actors and actresses but I really love the actresses the most; the actors are all really good in this but Hilary, Katie, and Cate are all phenomenal, like Annabelle's gift. Blanchett is a pure actress. Everyone else is just for kicks and giggles. I get a lot of kicks and a lot of giggles over Katie Holmes in The Gift. I love Katie Holmes. She's almost as pretty as Cate. Cate, you sly devil, I love you. The Gift is a fascinating, complex, and excellent showcase of a movie. I'm not sure why you want me to tell you that it's not like I have special mental powers or anything. I just love movies and I really love beautiful woman, like Cate, and Katie, and Hilary, and Kim Dickens. I would go get readings from Annabelle just to be with her, in a sweet way, kind of like Buddy. Donnie is a crazy creep and Wayne is a raging psycho. The Gift is very underappreciated by everyday people but not by movie lovers. I love The Gift really and it earns an 8 in my humble opinion attributed to the brilliant in depth acting and marvelous story writing. Katie Holmes' boobies are outrageously the best boobies for all ages of time. You didn't need foresight to know that that was coming. I love Katie Holmes and I really love Cate and this movie has an unforeseeable twist ending, unless you're really smart.

(Originally reviewed: 14/01/2017) Now where to start? This film opens with a scene where one of Blanchett's character's children says " Mommy what does F**k mean", could nobody think of better dialogue, most of the universe know what it means, but really, why waste time with that kind of silly nonsense. Then we meet Buddy played laughably bad by Giovanni Ribisi who is speaking so unclearly I was looking for the subtitles option on the remote. Swank plays a wife beaten controlled woman with little to no personality, her husband Donnie played by the miscast Keanu Reeves is a real scumbag who pretty much tries to attack half of the characters, I for one cannot believe Reeves playing a bad guy, as it just does not look convincing in the slightest. J.K Simmons is in charge of the disappearance case but seems like an uncaring, disrespectable lawman, who is more interested on who took his donuts or if there's fresh coffee. Chelcie Ross (Jessica's father) does little worth mentioning except for his laughably awful scream, or cry, or whatever that sound was half way through the picture. My most hateful performance would have to go to Katie Holmes (Jessica) though, who plays a spoilt whore and the girl that goes missing, but I for one was thankful she was no longer on the screen, as she is untalented and embarrassing. However there were two watchable performances, notably by Cate Blanchett (Annie the fortune teller) and Greg Kinnear (Jessica's fiancé), who at least made one or two scenes bearable at the least. I expect more from a decent director like Sam Raimi who's also responsible for this mess. The Gift is labelled as a horror film, but a few cheap images and suspense free plotting would say otherwise, I also didn't feel thrilled or remotely interested into what was going on.Before the ending I have to point out more rotten stuff, such as its lack of interesting dialogue and Buddy (Ribisi) going on about how he touches himself thinking about his father, (In which later on he tries to set him on fire and gets sectioned) which is so painfully cringeworthy I wonder who's idea it was to add a distasteful theme like that to a horror picture. Sure there's one decent courtroom scene that lasts all but 5 minutes but it's better than anything else in this wreck. Now time for the ending, where we find out whodunit; so Kinnear strikes Blanchett over the head with a torch, a few seconds later he is prevented from killing her (by Buddy of all people) only later on when they make a quick stop to the police station with Kinnear, the officer tells Annie (Blanchett) that Buddy has hanged himself at the psychiatric hospital therefore he could not have saved her, meaning it was apparently his ghost that had come and saved her, which is so ridiculous, inept and void of common sense, it puts the nail in the coffin for this suspense free, horror clunker.

The Gift is one of the more serious films made by Sam Raimi,which is not a positive and not a negative thing, because this movie is as good as Evil Dead, or Spider-Man, only a different kind of Story.It's from 2000, around this time people seemed to make movies to tell interesting stories, not just to sell toys, and this movie is a great example. It's written by the well-known actor Billy Bob-Thornton who was inspired by his mother who apparently had some sort of psychic powers. If you believe something like that or not is completely subjective and has no impact on your enjoyment of this fictional tale, which is very dramatic and very well told.The camera-work isn't as outrages and wild as in over Raimi movies, which fits the story and underlines the tone of the movie perfectly. Because of this, the creative and intense scenes in which the protagonist has symbolic dreams, or psychic premonitions are all the more effective, and the visual effects are almost unnoticeable, even after all these years.The acting in this film is overall fantastic, one of the strongest reasons why this movie works for me is that i was completely engaged. I was afraid that Cate Blanchett's character, or her children could get hurt by Keanu Reeves, who's unbelievably threatening in this film and gives one of his best performances. Not to mention Giovanni Ribisi, J.K. Simmons, Katie Holmes or especially Greg Kinnear.The soundtrack by Christopher Young (who Raimi would later work with on Spider-Man 3) also fits well for the setting and atmosphere. All in all i was very surprised by the quality of this movie, which also has a very satisfying conclusion.It reminded me in some aspects of one of my favourite thrillers "What lies beneath" which came out the same year...

A woman with extrasensory perception is asked to help find a young woman who has disappeared. The Gift is not one of Sam Raimi's all time best movies but it's still a very entertaining one with a very talented cast such as Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Keanu Reeves, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, J.K. Simmons and Rosemary Harris and i gotta say it was pretty good what he did with some actors here especially Harris and Simmons since he cast them again in 3 more movies later on as Aunt May and Jonah Jameson in The Spider-Man Trilogy. It does have some small issues like some over the top sequences or even scenes with certain characters but as far as acting, direction and script goes the film does deliver a lot!!