Watch Gotham For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

Absolutely the worst movie.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Interesting plot, good acting by Virginia Madsen and Tommy Lee Jones. And probably the best rendition of Danny Boy classic (by JB White), that I have ever heard. The story revolves around the Private Eye (Jones), hired by the wealthy man, to find the ghost of his deceased wife (Madsen), whom he buried 10 years earlier. She asked to be buried naked, with her jewels. Her husband initially obliged, only to dig her up later on, to retrieve the jewels. Now the ghost of his wife has returned to hound him. Soon the ghost is found, but the detective is convinced that the woman is real (which she obviously is not) and falls in love with her. There is a bit of nudity and implied sex in the film ... and in the end ... the ghost gets her jewels (which turn out to be a paste), the detective is told that having sexual intercourse with a ghost is detrimental to his health .... and the ex-husband is back, where he started. All very intriguing.I have seen the film back in 1989, on TV in UK ... and later on, when I wanted to buy the DVD, I could not find it anywhere, till now .... on Amazon. It has been released in NTSC format only, so you will need the multi-region DVD player to watch it if you live within EU.

I'm not certain how I missed Fonvielle's 'Gotham' (or 'The Dead Cant Lie', TV 1988) when it came out in the late 80's...I found this by accident, and enjoyed watching it late one night. I can't agree more with the other comments/reviews already listed praising this film. I have two suggestions though...one viewers can do nothing about, and one you can. Sadly the format is (made-for-TV) full-screen, and there are many instances during the film when it's painfully obvious that a wide-screen format would add immensely to the atmosphere and mood. There's not much you can do about that though; however, what you can do, is turn your TV's 'Color' off, or desaturate the color, and add a little 'Contrast', to enjoy this film in B/W ('film noir'). As for Fonvielle, his 'The Mummy' (1999) is also a fun-filled thrill not to be missed, and 'Cherry 2000' (1987) has Melanie Griffith in her finest form (maybe ever!). His other writing credits are worthy of mention, but both 'The Bride' (1985) and 'The Lords of Discipline' do not seem to have been given the production, or directorial justice, that Fonvielle's work deeply deserved. Watch 'Gotham' as an 80's tribute to classic film noir, and/or as an intriguing preview to 'A Prairie Home Companion' (2006).

I first saw Gotham in 1989 and then in 2001 and it stood up well: Gotham is on the one hand an ironic tribute to hard-boiled detective movies, but it chooses to keep its irony under the surface rather than over-the-top, telling a susupenseful and carefully unfolded story with real twists and turns even as it tosses the occasional wink taht we've seen the set-pieces before. There is real suspense as we watch Tommy Lee Jones get in way over his head--he takes it well enough when he discovers, early on, that he is indeed dealing with a malicious ghost--but from there on he is forced to watch with his own investigators detatchemht as he fall in love with this ghost, going down hill physically and every other way step by step--at the end, he is faced with a battle for his soul as serious as Sam Spades faces at the end of "Maltese Falcon"--and, even at the end, the wry humor returns to wrap it all nicely up. By the way--keep yuour eye out for spooky oddities at ther corner of your vision--they are there!

If now Oscar-winner Tommy Lee Jones were allowed to delete all memory of one of his previous films, no doubt he would choose this incredible mess of a thriller to cast into oblivion. He plays a private dick who is hired by a rich husband to settle some matters with his ex-wife, who is holding some jewelry of his in her possession. Only that the woman apparently has been dead for a decade! He takes the case thinking of making easy money with a crackpot client, but the woman appears to be alive and well and even very seductive (Virginia Madsen, no less), all qualities painfully lacking in the film, which is slow, poorly acted (evidence of a great lack of enthusiasm on the side of Tommy and par for the course for Madsen)and disconcertingly ambiguous, undecided between a solid thriller of unexpected final twists (which it has not) and a run of the mill ghost-story that had traded horror for sensuality. Really dreadful.