Before You Go

In a film industry where the lack of money spent on script development for the big-budget movies is constantly bemoaned, films like this are supposed to come along and make the viewer yearn for the good old days when movies were rich in character, colour and conversation. After this dire effort, though, I'm back to waiting for the X-Men and Matrix sequels. The cast list suggests better, but the performances across the board are very weak, the characters totally one-dimensional and the story JUST NOT INTERESTING. I suspect it was supposed to be a study of the different ways we deal with personal grief, but the director failed to put this across in any kind of coherent or engaging fashion. I hate to single anyone out for particular criticism, but Joanne Whalley was school-play awful. Save your 90 minutes and do almost anything else.

An excellent film with superb acting by all the cast. Encapsulated the lives of three sisters with humour, tragedy, pathos and humanity. A welcome change from some of the more digitalised and violent films of the recent era. Difficult to pick out which was the best actress they were all so good and so different. The funeral scene at the end was brilliant. The audience reaction was one of pure pleasure at a good story well acted and presented. Top marks to the Director.

When their mother passes away, estranged sisters Theresa, Mary and Catherine come back together for the funeral. Theresa is the eldest and expected to hold everything together despite her own stresses. Mary is being "haunted" by visions of her dead mother, bringing buried secrets and pain to the surface – a situation not helped by her already fragile relationship with married lover Mike. Meanwhile youngest sister Catherine seems no different from the last time she was seen – spinning from man to man, keeping everything soft with drug use. As the funeral approaches, secret or buried hurts come out within the family.

From Lewis Gilbert and featuring a great cast when I read the credits in the paper, I had reasonable hopes for this film. Sadly they were mostly dashed in a film that didn't seem to have a handle on what it actually wanted to do. The result of this is that the script is keen to embrace a quick joke or attempts at colourful characters but seems either unwilling or (more likely) unable to get to the heart of the matter and deliver and emotionally engaging film that is full or real hurt, real healing and real people. This leaves the film floating around in a way that is not bad but is certainly not any good – meaning that I got more and more bored as the film went on, to the point where I left the room for five minutes but couldn't be bothered to pause the DVD.

The cast aren't able to do much without the help of writer or director. Walters flaps around but is nothing more than a flustered comedy character who doesn't actually produce laughs. Whalley is handed the greater responsibility and the stronger character but fails to do much with it; she and her mother share the strongest scenes but neither is that good and their scenes lack a real emotional hook. Hamilton is only ever annoying and feels like an easy cliché for the writers, once they had written the first two characters. The male support is so-so mainly because neither Hannah or Wilkinson are really given much to work with and are very much on the edges of the film.

Overall this was a disappointing film that didn't do anything that it had the potential to do. Not bad per se but it certainly isn't any good as it roundly fails to deliver on the promise of complex relationships. The cast offer much but aren't given anything to work with and only do OK. Not really worth a look to be honest.

I am a A Level Drama student and for my final performance my group are performing 'The Memory of Water' the original play by Shelagh Stephenson. As soon as our group read the script we thought it was great, it has plenty of humour and pace and great characters and is a pleasure to read and perform.

So when we discovered this movie version we were expecting a little gem of a film... however this was not the case! Not even the all star cast could save this film from sinking. It was truly disappointing - the acting was poor and the whole mood of the film was completely lack lustre. The directors interpretation completely downplayed all the humour in the play and the witty and bickering tension between the sisters. He turned the play into one long boring non-event.

I would highly recommend the play, but to anyone else performing this play I would give this film version a definite miss as you will only be left disappointed!

A story of bereavement and grieving with lots of comic relief, an absent minded priest and three very different sisters coming back to their childhood home for the funeral of their Mother. We loved this movie, the location was breathtaking, the actors were excellent and the story kept us glued. Maybe coming from a three sister family and being the youngest I could identify with the characters and their strange relationships with their mother. There was lots of humour in the movie, but we had debates throughout as to the location, the accents were Lancashire/northern English yet they were supposed to have grown up on the Isle of Man. I would recommend this movie as a good watch if you like Julie Walters and British comedy/drama in general, if you're into action and car chases - leave it on the shelf.