The Riverbank

This is about as enthralling as watching two flies making out on a light bulb on a Sunday night.

I'm three quarters of the way through this film and I'm starting to feel like I've lived in this one horse town all my life. It's like sitting in an old ladies knitting circle listening to gossip that isn't worth listening to. All I need is for some dork like Tom Hanks to appear in a cameo role.

There's nothing to grip the imagination at all. There's no new twist in the tale because no one in the movie reveals anything at all. They should have called this 'Idle Gossip' or 'Going Nowhere. I'll give it 5 out of 964 billion.

A really good movie. Of course Kari Matchett again hits it out of the ballpark with her usual aplomb, her performance alone is worth the time invested. But Kari didn't have to do all the heavy lifting because the casting of this movie is unusually strong. Inga Cadranel shined as she stood out among a really fine acting lineup, usually there is always at least one actor'ess/character who is unable to keep up but this movie's cast is really solid. Writing never lost track of the pace, nor insulted us with tropes, the mood was almost noir-like and I appreciated the writers not resorting to the easy-out way with their story. The direction was on a Hollywood feature level and the production levels were tops. You can tell those associated with this movie were pros. I have to say this again, if Kari Matchett is cast in a TV/Movie it is must see viewing.

It's wrong for imdb to place Kari Matchett third in the credits since not only does she dominate the entire movie, she's listed as the star in the film credits... which is as it should be. She easily outperforms the entire cast. Let us hope the editors fix that.

"The Riverbank" is a small, simple movie, with simple aims, not attempting a galactic view like the Thor & Captain America stuff that was all the rage in 2012, but it still has a lot of great performances.

The actors are much better than this script though, sadly, and with the cheesy production values, feeble music and cliché police sirens in the transition scenes, it ends up as a sort of Hallmark Mystery.

Kari Matchett deserves a lot better.

It looked like a good plot and I stayed on to see what really happened as the story opens up a lot of questions - did her mum die or did she run away. If she died, was it murder? And was her step-mum murdered too? And who murdered them? Well, all these questions made me stay on to the ending. The pace wasn't that good either. The leading female's character wasn't that likeable too. In the end, the answers were revealed though not really a huge surprise. But what I didn't like was what happened thereafter. There seem to be loopholes in the law and order as certain person was not charged for burying a dead body secretly or shooting another person. Strange and made the movie rather unbelievable.

Certainly not the worst movie I've ever seen, and I believe I even gasped at one point, but the climax of the movie and the reveal were rather meh. Considering the script and pacing they had to work with I thought the actors themselves did a decent job.