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I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Blistering performances.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Richard (Clive Owen) and his older sister Natalie (Saskia Reeves) are friend-like with some sexual tension. They grew up separately when their parents divorced. While Natalie flounders over the next few years, Richard becomes a success and a womanizer. Then she marries the wealthy business consultant Sinclair Bryant (Alan Rickman). Richard finds her changed under the domineering Sinclair. The siblings start a passionate affair together.It's a taboo subject done with sexuality and three great actors. The brother sister relationship is compelling and weirdly mesmerizing. It's a bit disturbing with the romantic tones. It's a twisted romantic melodrama. Clive and Saskia really sell this relationship.

Close My Eyes is a mild and genteel examination of sibling incest amid the London yuppie set and against the backdrop of riverside redevelopment along the Thames. Natalie Gillespie (Saskia Reeves) is an unhappy woman of working class roots. We know this from a quick moving opening sequence of brief scenes that covers five years of her dissatisfied love relationships whining to her ambitious sexy brother, Richard, who she is distanced in age and personality. Richard Gillespie (Clive Owens), is a studly young architect, outgoing unlike his sullen sister, and able to successfully pursue his intellectual and creative pursuits. After a shared late night kiss, reality was quickly passed over as simply cuddling until Natalie rekindles her relationship with the long absent brother dearest. Again bored, and with a new husband, Sinclair Bryant (Alan Rickman), a financial wiz who is pompous, condescending of his wife, and wealthy from family money, Natalie and Richard cross the line of social taboos with a torrid sexual affair. Richard's distraction with his sister becomes obsession while she is simply using him for excitement against a vacuous social schedule with unsuspecting Sinclair. The danger of forbidden fruit and illegal sexual thrill drives the couple to meet under the nose of Natalie's cuckold husband. Inept Sinclair is faithful to his wife and his work routine. A chatterbox of politeness, Sinclair's privileged upbring, beautiful homes, and class distance him from Natalie's insecurities. To make up for her shortcomings, she manipulates the game through her little brother, whose confidence is eroding under the spell of his sister's vacillation and sexual control.Superior performances by Alan Rickman (An Awfully Big Adventure) in easily one of his most sympathetic roles grounds the erotic performance of Clive Owen (Closer, Croupier), who is naked for extensive portions of the movie. They surround Saskia Reeve's performance with sufficient testosterone to overshadow the shortcomings of the secondary story line of Richard's boss who is dying of AIDS. Although meant to have social relevance, incest and AIDS seem an unlikely pairing. Perhaps it is the notion of the unspoken pariah status of its victims, or the rightness or wrongness of the sibling's actions that is never examined in depth which makes the film unsuccessful and somewhat dated. It is a weakness surrounding what motivates Natalie's disenchantment with her perfect situation, or why Richard is so drawn to his older sister that the audience is left to ponder. Unlike a Tennessee Williams story of forbidden excesses, Close My Eyes becomes an exercise in the boredom of river front living by a menage of shallow characters.

This film is an expanded and improved rewrite of Poliakoff's early play Hitting Town. I have always found Poliakoff's plays filmic; this reworking on film is more interesting than the play, although the starkness of the incest in Hitting Town was probably more shocking, and the 1970's UK audience was probably more susceptible to shock.Three great performances in this film - Saskia Reeves, Clive Owens and Alan Rickman. Poliakoff has a great knack of mixing the profound, the profane and the mundane. One telling scene in Richard's flat has Richard and Natalie agonising over their tryst, then making love, while in the background a rain-affected test match (cricket) fails to happen and then starts to happen again. Unforgettable symbolism - Bergman would have used it if only the Swedes played cricket.This film is well worth seeing.

I'm surprised this movie isn't rated higher - I can't think of anyone who's seen it who hasn't liked it. Women who see it are all mesmerised by Alan Rickman, who rather steals the show. For many women this was their first taste of Rickman, and it was love at first sight! He _is_ good, and he's cast in an interesting role (Saskia Reeves cheats on him when she has an affair with her brother, played by Clive Owen, who was probably more famous than Rickman at the time because he'd recently starred in a very successful TV drama series). The incest plot is treated very well - the script, acting and direction are excellent. The whole situation is set up so as not to shock, but to make us think, and I think the film succeeds.