Recensioni degli utenti

OMG i can't believe this John guy he talk an Engrish that i can clearly understand, and he look and act exactly like my gay friends in here, in Vietnam, the director did so good about that, i'm so glad to see a Vietnamese in a gay film, we did make some gay films here too but it too little... about this film, i can tell that why things happened in this film, prob it not a love story, just another lonely and sad one that make me feel so bad, it good itseft, but it just so.... realistic.

I was into the movie as I watched it, all the while wondering where it was going. When it ended, I thought I had skipped about 30 minutes ahead, because it just seemed unfinished.

I thought the lead actor, Shayne Gray, was excellent in the part. I thought he was so natural and acted without any bit of effort. His responses, his actions, his emotions, all were very natural. I was sorry to see that this was the only film he's been in. I would very much liked to have seen him in other films.

This film was interesting, but after seeing it through to the end, there was no point to it, I'm sorry to say. I wanted to know more about where each character was going to go, but since the film is 11 years old now, there's no way that's going to happen. Worth seeing, but just be prepared that it's going to end just as it gets interesting.

Story about handsome hunky Lincoln (Shayne Gray) who has a girlfriend and lots of great guy friends. He also likes having anonymous gay sex secretly. He meets John (Thang Chan) a Vietnamese gay guy--and things happen. Notice I didn't say interesting cause NOTHING interesting happens in this!

Slow, murky, dark and very uninteresting story about a destructive relationship. The low production values really hurt this. Also the story takes forever to get started...and ends up going nowhere! It just stops with no resolution at all. A lot of people seem to like this because Gray is so handsome. He IS handsome...but not much of an actor. I've seen worse but I've seen MUCH better. Chan was better than Gray but (understandably) seems unsure of how to play the character. Pretty dull too.

Slow, murky, unsatisfying. You can skip this one. I give it a 4...mostly for Gray's looks. Also why did Chan do a nude scene and Gray didn't?

"THE DELTA is wanting in focus, maundering in a scattershot fashion that becomes a norm in 1990s indie sphere and later the "mumblecore" in the noughties (often in default of a scintillating script and/or munificent funds). For instance, the passages depicting Lincoln's social life with his entitled friends feel wretchedly slack, totally disengaged from the film's theme. It is also not helping by the fact that Gray is a pretty but empty vase, a polite smile of condescension is his only expression regardless of what happens. However, Sachs shows more promise in his attempt to probe John's intersectionality (black, Asian, gay and immigrant constitute a gold mine, which is a rare sight). John's dialogue hews closely to the subculture vernacular and Chan pours out enough raw emotion into John's dysphoria-turned-cynicism-and-resentment, which poignantly projects a sharp political angle to elevate the film slightly above its ilks."

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I had waited for this movie to come out on DVD for 10 years after missing it at the Tampa Gay Film Festival in 1996. What a disappointment. The summary notes are very misleading. This is a very dark movie with no plot and no character development. Writing, film quality, audio, acting and especially directing were simply horrible. I can see why none of the actors never did any other work...perhaps they would have performed better had they been given something remotely decent to work with. By the end of the film was I was yelling at myself for wasting 85 minutes of my life. This movie failed to provide any emotional attachment to any of the characters, whether good or bad. Do not waste your time with this movie.

Call me by your name meets Moonlight ... but with no final resolution.

This movie provides a sleepy, dreamlike experience. The director shows you many places, relationships, and conflicts. He sets moods, but doesn't judge his characters. Refreshing enough. It's up to you as the viewer to determine how you feel about the people and their conflicts. And it's up to the viewer to decide how things end up because everything is not explained. There was a lot of heart in this film. Some of these reviews seem to miss that. Watch this on an overcast Sunday afternoon and fall in love with Shayne Gray and The Delta.

If you have time, watch it again with the Director's commentary. The director, Ira Sachs, shares a lot about himself and his experience making this film. He is very honest about what he was trying to achieve, the scenes with which he was pleased, and those with which he wasn't. I would like to see more of Ira Sachs's work.

Thinks it's clever, but it's not. Long, dull teenage scenes from parties made me sleep for a brief minute or two. Lincoln's struggles with his sexuality as a gay or straight man are well handled, but Minh (African-American and Vietnamese) is so clearly alienated from society that his empathy is sickening. The end of the film is fun to talk about, but this film is pretentious.

This movie wasted tooo much time on other subjects. It should of made the storyline with the two guys a lot more intense and interesting. Instead - yawwwwwwn city. Who cared about the slacker boys and girls getting high in what looked like a garage. Or the relationship between that girl and Shayne.

This movie could have been a whole lot better.

The handsome "Lincoln" (Shayne Gray) has a decent life, plenty of money and a girlfriend "Monica" (Rachel Zan Huss) but he also has a secret. When she declines to put out one evening, he heads to a cruising area of Memphis where he initially encounters a daddy figure before meeting "Minh". He's a Vietnamese man who is almost the antithesis of "Lincoln". His mother quite recently arrived in the USA, his father was an American soldier - they split up and he's now living with some fellow Vietnamese. They two men chat but "Minh" isn't so keen to go straight for the sex; he wants to get to know his new friend a little. To that end, they take his father's boat and a different kind of cruise on the delta; have a beer and set off some fireworks. It's that latter activity that annoys the police and sends "Minh" feeing into the forest. Has he something to hide? Well the tail end of the film enlightens us a little to the true nature of this man. I did like the concept here, but I'm afraid the acting is pretty nondescript and for a film that relies heavily on conversation, the audio mix makes much of the dialogue inaudible and that proves quite irritating after a while. I think it might have made for a better short feature. Condensing it's more potent aspects into an hour or so might have given it more punch, but as it is - it's too slow and thinly strung out.

This is not a good film. The writer-director, in an interview, explained that he wrote the script, saw a Bergman film that influenced script changes, and then there were further changes when he hired the actor to portray the Vietnamese character. At that point, a total rewrite was needed. The stories don't hold together. Emphasis shifts from one character to another, seemingly secondary, character by the end of the film. Visually, it is too dark. Memphis is its locale and was important to its director, but there is no feel of Memphis in the film. Beyond that, the story isn't very interesting. I think this is one of those films that is very personal to its director, but doesn't have much to interest the rest of us. My life would not be interesting on film, either, which is why it is NOT on film.

Ira Sachs is undeniably a filmmaker who knows precisely what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. He's a masterful storyteller, and I'm kicking myself for not discovering this film sooner, especially considering I fancy myself a dedicated Sundance Film Festival follower.

Shot on 16mm in 1996, the film's visual texture is not a mere affectation; Sachs chose this format because it perfectly complements the narrative's raw and intimate nature. The grainy, dreamlike quality of the 16mm footage evokes a sense of nostalgia and longing, mirroring the emotional landscape of the characters.

Thanks to Mubi, this remarkable queer narrative can be enjoyed in a high-quality transfer. It's a film that shouldn't be missed, especially while it's readily available on the platform.

"The Delta" is a coming-of-age story set in the languid heat of Memphis, Tennessee. It follows the journey of Lincoln, a young man grappling with his sexual identity and the complexities of desire. Sachs's direction is both sensitive and unflinching, capturing the raw emotions and unspoken yearnings of his characters with a delicate touch.

The film's performances are uniformly excellent, with Shayne Gray delivering a breakout performance as Lincoln. His portrayal of a young man caught between societal expectations and his own desires is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Thang Chan, as Minh, the Vietnamese-American man who becomes the object of Lincoln's affection, is equally compelling, his quiet intensity and vulnerability drawing the viewer into his world.

The film's languid pacing and atmospheric cinematography create a sense of timelessness, allowing the viewer to fully immerse themselves in the characters' lives. The soundtrack, a mix of blues, gospel, and ambient sounds, further enhances the film's emotional resonance.

"The Delta" is a film that speaks to the universal human experience of longing, love, and the search for self-acceptance. It's a testament to the power of cinema to explore the complexities of the human heart with honesty, compassion, and a touch of poetic grace.

The temptation is to write about obvious good intentions. Shayne Gray is just cute and this seems be the basic virtue offered to his character .

Thang Chan performance is the basic good point of film, presenting, sure, with a good fist of ciches, the reaistic image of allianation.

The probem, maybe the first part, we intentioned , ooking for suggest the struggle of Lincoln with his sexuality but, unfortunately, too ong and pretty boring.

In short, just a familiar indie recipe, not different by another, proposing faces of loneliness and reminding social traumas in fair manner.

The end is so predictable than just works as nice confirmation of what you suppose.

So, a nice film . Sure, for a precise target.

A well thought out and constructed film, with amazingly simple elements and story, in which two men live a short escapade for a couple of days, but they separate in the same way as their fleeting first encounter in search of impersonal sex.

An early example of observational cinema, «The Delta» de-emphasizes the traditional resources of drama and builds the profile of its two characters through a neat description of actions and precise reduction of words. On the one hand, Lincoln, a white boy from Memphis, who appears to lead a normal life; on the other, "John", a dark-skinned Vietnamese émigré, who hides a murky side beneath his apparent life on the fringes of social conventions. In the middle, a city, a family, customs, relationships, the night, eroticism, drugs, the migrant subculture, and a fortuitous escape in search of an inconsistent freedom.

Director Ira Sachs (born in Memphis) executed the film with a solid hand, based on situations he must know too well, to the point that his frequent moments of naturalism disarm and evoke the best moments of fiction cinema with ethnographic features, thanks to the highly effective performances by Shayne Gray and Thang Chan.

The narrative strategy and, above all, a "resolution" in which nothing is resolved, because everyone continues to live, reminded me that, 12 years later, Lucrecia Martel did something similar in «La mujer sin cabeza» and everyone applauded and covered the film with awards.

Although Ira Sachs became a prestigious filmmaker, it is surprising how this 1996 film has been practically buried, because its most outstanding features were already common in the best independent and contemplative North American cinema of the late twentieth century. Highly recommended for those who admire films that were at the vanguard when released, exorcised from the Aristotelian model.