Recensioni di Metacritic

The best things about The Thing Called Love are its cast, style and mood. It has a snap, pace and rhythm we don't ordinarily see in today's movies. The dialogue scenes have a headlong pace and crackling self-confidence reminiscent of Howard Hawks, and the three- and four-way love combats recall Ernst Lubitsch.

Phoenix is fine in an odd, transitional role, but Mathis (who looks more like his sister than his girlfriend) really steals the show with a bright, sassy performance.

Perhaps there's not much new to say about the dues and disappointments involved in breaking into the country music scene, but the scenes are fresh and the emotions real in Peter Bogdanovich's tune-laden, mixed-mood drama.

Such strained touches notwithstanding, The Thing Called Love charms and touches, not the least for revealing Bogdanovich as a rare filmmaker still interested in human behavior, keeping the action mostly in medium shots and extended takes to better catch the emotional nuances from character to character.

Mildly engaging, formulaic.

You sense River Phoenix would rather be elsewhere, and whether he’s responding to the movie or to something larger is not ours to say. But the feeling persists. It’s like watching a premature ghost.

Thin and predictable, and a flop of awesome proportions in the US, this has occasional bursts of freshness, but mostly leaves you with the nagging impression that Mathis ended up with the wrong guy.

Despite her underwritten character, Mathis easily takes top acting honors with equal parts toughness and tenderness.

But at the center of the film is an actor whose mind and heart are far, far away, and he is like a black hole, consuming light and energy. He's running on empty. Sometimes there are even scenes where you can sense the other actors scrutinizing Phoenix in a certain way, or urging him, with their tones of voice, to an energy level he cannot match. It is all very sad.

This is stilted stuff. The acting is disjointed, the movie should be subtitled Three Actors in Search of Their Characters. River Phoenix gives a somnambulant impersonation of Christian Slater impersonating Jack Nicholson, and Samantha Mathis spends much of the movie trying to figure out exactly who her character is.