Captives

This movie's premise-a prisoner and outsider falling in love- may normally turn many people off. Surprisingly, is well-scripted, wonderfully filmed (some of the best camera shots and angles I've ever seen, and exceptionally well-performed. Julia Ormond, who I normally don't much care for, was wonderful. Tim Roth, as usual, blew me away. It remains one of the few movies I can watch repeatedly.

Anyone remember Julia Ormond ? She was a British actress touted as the next big thing in Hollywood and starred in the female friendly movies LEGENDS OF THE FALL and SABRINA . CAPTIVES is another chick flick movie starring Ormond and to be honest I think it's her best starring role

Ormond plays Rachel Clifford a newly qualified dentist who sometimes works in a prison . After finishing work she does her shopping at a supermarket and bumps into one of the inmates called Philip Chaney who is nearing his release date . After striking up a connection ... Ah but that would be telling

I found CAPTIVES a thoroughly engrossing drama for the most part . Yeah anything involving a romance between two mismatched people isn't usually my kind of movie and I doubt if it was produced for a target audience of 30 something blokes , but that's not to criticise it in anyway . The central plot of two people coming closer and closer together as seen here is convincing and the characters are well defined helped no doubt by the understated performances of Ormond and Roth . Alas it's not flawless

The problem is about two thirds of the way through there's a plot twist as if the producers said to themselves " Hold on let's try and liven things up a bit so it'll appeal to streetwise wannabe gangsta boys " . The screenplay did not need livening up since everything was going so well . Yeah as the demographic breakdown on this site shows far more females enjoyed this than males but there's no way CAPTIVES can be described as soppy , it's set in a prison for goodness sake and the shock ending should have been the revelation of what Chaney was in jail for and how this affected the new relationship . Like the famous cult film SCUM this is another movie featuring the British penal system whose natural ending takes place two thirds of the way in and has a rather illogical final third tacked on in the hope of shocking the audience

So that's the major problem with CAPTIVES and why it loses it's potential when it had fulfilled much of it earlier on . It was also produced by the BBC and unsurprisingly it has this made for TV feel instead of a cinematic sensation which may disappoint some people . I did enjoy watching it at the time but when I came to type this review I'd almost forgotten why mainly due to the ending , same as it appears everyone seems to have forgotten Julia Ormond

I just got finished viewing Captives and I liked it A lot. I guess it was Tim Roth's interaction with Ormond that drew me in and stopped me from switching channels. A lot of dialogue was spoken not with words, but with expressions. And the more I think about it, the more I feel the movie kept a constant level of tension throughout. As for believability, I know love can be blind, having been in love myself and that thought, for me, kept the movie alive. I give it a big thumb's up.

Rachel Clifford is a teacher in a dentistry school who starts doing a few days a week in a local prison while breaking up with her husband. It is in this delicate state that she meets prisoner Philip Chaney in the chair. When she meets him again it is in a supermarket – she is doing a shop while he is on day release to attend college. From this informal meeting they gain a natural, chatty air and, with neither really understanding why, they start to become close and meet up each time he gets out. However, in the vicious world of prison there are no real secrets and it is only a matter of time before other cons will see this as a chance to manipulate the situation to their advantage.

Although this sounds like it has a terrible plot, it actually works pretty well for the majority of the film. The core relationship that drives the film is convincingly developed and it is only really in the later stages of the film that the need for a dramatic narrative sees things turning away from the small scale and become slightly less convincing. Of course by then I was into the characters and could forgive it but it still didn't sit that easily with me. Of course for some viewers even the relationship side won't work and I can understand why; some will see it as clunky and obvious but for me it worked and it did so for two reasons.

The first reason is the acting. Ormond may have seemed to have dropped off the A-list that she was in during the mid-1990's but here she is great. Her character is just damaged and frail enough to be needy enough to fall in love in such a situation but not to the point where her love seems like a failing. It sounds simple but it isn't and yet Ormond manages to pull it off. Roth is always interesting and he is just as good here. He is dark, hurt, filled with regret and entirely unsure of how to exist in the two worlds (prison and love) at the same time. They go well together and make things a lot more natural than the plot summary would suggest. The second reason is Pope. Her direction is very good and makes the most out of what must have been a modest budget – only occasionally does it show that it was a BBC film. She never overdoes stuff to draw emotion from the audience and she lets the actors work well.

Overall this was a good film but one that requires you to accept that you are watching a slow BBC drama rather than a Hollywood tearjerker. The story may not be totally convincing but it is not for the want of trying – Pope, Ormond and Roth combine to make this much better than it could have been. Worth seeing for slow development and engaging performances although I wonder how well it sells outside of a UK market more suited to this sort of slow burn stuff.

I saw this film when it came out on British TV in the 1990s and it's remained embedded in my memory ever since. All young Hollywood directors should be contractually obliged to see "Captives" to see what real on-screen chemistry is like: the heat and intensity generated between leads Tim Roth and Julia Ormond just isn't something you see in every modern film, so much so that there were moments when I almost wanted to look away, embarrassed for their intimacy and urgency, shout "get a room!" – ah, but there's the rub – they can't. He's in prison; she's the visiting prison dentist, and they're caught in an impossible position that there's no easy escape from.

Others here have described the story well, so I won't cover that ground again. But it's exactly the kind of "little" British film I love to watch: when they're good, you're rewarded with an unusually good cast, a decent script and a neat premise that draws you in and grips you. The slightly unconvincing conclusion doesn't detract from how very enjoyable and stirring this film is.

"Captives" illustrates why Tim Roth deserved his reputation as an actor; but I'm sorry not to have seen more of Julia Ormond on screen since the 90s. Is it that she's in that twilight zone of female actresses, who suffer from the lack of good parts for women who don't look twenty years younger than their age?