Sidney Hall

After reading some poor reviews about this film I felt compelled to come to imdb and write a review. I watched this film last night and thought one thing throughout: brilliant. I will not go into too much detail but the way the story unravels is rather unique and the acting is very strong all around. I thoroughly enjoyed the screenplay and cannot remember when a film caught me this off guard. I laughed and even got choked up at parts of this film. It just pulls you in from the get go. It was a great change of pace from the rest of the garbage being released these days.

I'll preface by saying I watch an inordinate amount of movies and I never leave reviews. I had to post since this has to be one of the worst & most inaccurate critic scores I've seen.

This character story isn't quite the mystery that I was expecting from the title. Sidney Hall, famous writer, willingly disappears, and it's a character piece about why and how. It's slow at times with some great dramatic beats, but overall, I found the whole thing to be a bit too sad to be enjoyable. Thoughtful filmmaking though.

Even though Sidney Hall is not perfect, it's a compelling story with some nice writing, and in my opinion, superb acting by Lerman and Fanning. It has a weird way to tell the story, starts somewhere in the end and then jumps through timeline several times. But after all, it does make sense. In fact, I loved last 20 minutes of the movie. It gave all the answers, they made sense, and it was kinda sad.

The story is gripping, the acting is flawless, the humour is funny, the ending is worth the wait, but... the transitions between the main character's life periods are confusing, especially between adolescence and young adulthood, if you are not paying close attention. In addition, you are not sure what the main character is feeling and you remain a spectator throughout. A good film though, I am glad to have seen it.