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One of my all time favorites.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Some films just go nowhere. They start in the middle of nowhere, continue down a road towards nowhere, and eventually end up.. guess where? Nowhere. There's no structure, no beats, little to no stakes, it's just people hanging about in a non-story. Now, this can either make for a boring film stuck in doldrums of its own making, or it can somehow oddly just.. work. Matt Dillon's City Of Ghosts falls in the latter category, lucky him. This was Dillon's writing and directing debut, with him front and centre as the lead, which is a lot of pressure, but he's crafted a meandering little exercise in mood that, although providing nothing groundbreaking or all that memorable, is a great time to watch in the dreamy AM hours when you just need something vague and atmospheric to fill the space. Matt plays a professional con artist who is forced to voyage from the US to find his boss and mentor (James Caan), last seen in Cambodia. That sounds like a setup ripe for intrigue and double crosses, right? Not so much. Once he's there, things congeal into a smoky, languishing chamber piece that sees Dillon just wandering from one exotic locale to the next with a troupe of fellow travellers, and eventually the James Caan character, a fairly eccentric and charismatic fellow. There's a vague love interest (the ever beautiful Natasha McElhone, always terrific), a jovial innkeeper (Gerard Depardieu) and other wayward souls who flit in and out of the proceedings, all amidst this authentic South Pacific setting (Dillon filmed on location in Cambodia, which does wonders for atmosphere). Stellan Skarsgard is in it too, a hoot as some associate of Caan's, a mopey, Eeyore-esque pessimist who sits about, smokes, mumbles despairing platitudes and does not much else. Beginning to see the picture? It goes nowhere, and by the end the characters seem to have gotten sidetracked fifty times over, never really achieving goals or making bank like they do in noir such as this. It's neat though, if you're in the right frame of mind, and have shelved both expectations and adrenal glands. This is a burnished, dreamy, laconic little piece that I rather enjoyed at the hypnotic hour of 2am on some random TV channel in the triple digits.

How many films have we seen set in decaying far away third world locations, way beyond the reach of law and order and inhabited by the detrius of the Western World, each with a shady past and all living on the edge. These films usually have as their title the name of the city in which they are set, Casablanca, Algiers, Maroc, Hong Kong, Shanghai - as long as it is exotic and off the beaten track, City of Ghosts is no exception. In the 1940s it would have been named Pnomg Peng and starred Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Gale Sondegaard, Marlene Deitrich, Hedy Lamaar, Jean Gabin and other favorites of the genre. All the requisite characters are there. All twisted, corrupt and ready to sell their own mothers at a snap of the fingers.The French exile Emile, owner of a run down hotel and bar, who may have been left over from the French colonization of Indo China and has no home in France, or maybe he is an escaped convict, or a deserter from the Foreign Legion. Who knows, he might be any and all of these things. He knows his way around, understands his low life customers, who to deal with, which palms to grease and more importantly - when.Other main characters comprise the not -quite-good guy around whom the story is built, the successful con man who might have gone in for one con too many, the corrupt general, the bar girls (boys) and of course, the decent clean western girl visiting old temples and naively treading her delicate way through the mud and filth.Cambodia is shown as a near derelict run down ruin of a place, crumbling buildings, dirt roads, rubbish strewn everywhere, although there are some glimpses of lovely homes and attractive gardens. I was reminded of "The Quiet American", "Brokedown Palace" and "Beyond Rangoon" the westerner suddenly cast adrift in a very different world. If you like to lose yourself in an intricate thriller set in foreign parts, with nostalgia for the film noir genre, I can recommend this film.

Matt Dillon's feature directorial debut left me disappointed. While the cinematography was good and the landscapes were interesting, I did not get the feeling that many of the actors were very connected to what they were doing. Matt Dillon did not show a very strong personal connection to James Caan (nor Caan to him)-a man he traveled halfway around the world to find, essentially to tell him that he no longer desired the life he was leading. Natascha McElhone's character seemed to fall for him very suddenly, and the whole relationship seemed as though it were added just to pass some time while plot unfolded, not as a very integral part of the plot. The only real interesting character in the film was the belligerent bartender, played by Gerard Depardieu.The movie becomes somewhat complex, but they give you few hints to sort out the facts as you go along, and you get the feeling that everyone is lying to everyone else, which simply gets annoying. I would have liked to see this drive Matt Dillon's character as crazy as it did me, but instead he keeps it pretty monotone throughout the entire film, never showing any extreme emotion despite the extreme situations he finds himself in. The result is a movie that you lose interest in before it reaches it's climax, so that when the truth is finally revealed, you no longer care.

The first thing my girlfriend said after watching this Dillon directed film was "wow, I feel like I've been to Cambodia!" City of Ghosts is packed with atmosphere. Really giving us a flavour of life in a beautiful, mysterious Cambodian city. On top of that we have a story which defies prediction. I for the life of me didn't see what was coming in the script. Very well done. Clever dialogue, loaded with insinuation and subtext. Interesting characters too. Nice people, weird people, bad people, mad people. Again, all believable stuff involved in a pretty weird situation. I'd watch this if I were you. Especially if you have a penchant for this part of the world.Tim PW