A late Monday night view and I am content with the experience. While I may not normally care for either Gosling or Dunst all that much, I feel they had a great chemistry and this could be my favorite roles for both of them. They did very good performances and had a nice synthesis together that worked better than anything I had seen them in previously.The directing was well done, and the aesthetic was very tasteful. The sets were carried out well and the over all look of the film allowed for a nice place of the eyes to go. There were some street scenes that were not only convincing but very nostalgic, and all of the set props and period era clothing and cars was proper. The screen play and story also worked much better than I expected. This wasn't the most intense movie but it had plenty enough to keep me interested. There were a couple of easy reads to the plot, and though I was not on the edge of my seat often, there were some tense moments.It wouldnt be in my top five movies to suggest, but I did enjoy with zero complaints. I am glad that I stumbled across this to pacify some late night mind stirring.

Andrew Jarecki, director of the acclaimed, ambiguous documentary 'Capturing the Friedmans', returns here to the subject of troubled families, with his account of the life of David Marks. The film must come dangerously close to libel, being based on the real life of Robert Durst, who was twice acquitted of murder (suffice it to say Jarecki does not seem so convinced by his plea of innocence). The film begins by painting a sympathetic portrait, of a man bullied by his tyrannical family, but soon begins showing us a less flattering side. Ulimtatley, the story lacks resolution, and a drama extrapolated from the truth like this is always in danger of falling between two stools: one expects a made-up story to attain different standards to one that is merely representing what happened. There's a high-class cast, but ultimately the film lacks both the cohesion of fiction and the compulsion of truth.

All Good Things is a film that's 'based on a true story.' However, I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen those words, only to find that the movie was so loosely based on reality that it might as well have been Star Wars. Yet, with All Good Things, it really is based on a real murder/missing persons case in America from the eighties.We see Ryan Gosling and Kristen Dunst meeting and falling in love. Everything seems idyllic until Gosling starts acting more and more strangely. Then his erratic behaviour starts to get physical and even violent. The strength of the movie as a story lies in its focus on a web of characters and their relationships to one another, rather than on the crimes themselves. We never see the actual violence, but only its effects on characters, and their subsequent efforts to conceal the truth, to escape from their situation, or to satisfy some personal need.We're given plenty of visual ammunition with which to base our own conclusions on who may or may not be guilty of which crimes, mainly through alluding to deviant mental conditions or sexual preferences. None of these offer any real evidence, only circumstantial. However, despite leaving the viewer in the role of judge as to whether Gosling's character is guilty or innocent, the film is worth watching for the two leads' performances. They do well to get into some very difficult characters and the film is definitely worth a look.So, not a great movie, but an engrossing entertainment if you are in the mood for a dark story that leaves you wondering how closely real events in fact matched up to this clever reconstruction.

'All Good Things' is the only big screen feature film made until now by director Andrew Jarecki, who seems to have been involved previously with documentary movies, and we can feel this. Although he had for this movie at hands a splendid team of Hollywood actors who did a fine job he did not succeed to turn the juicy crime story upon which the film is based into a real compelling piece of cinema.The story Jarecki is using is the highly publicized and never solved case of the disappearance in the early 80s of the wife of a rich class New Yorker, involved in the murky real-estate business of his family in the center of Manhattan. Twenty years and two more bodies later he was brought in Court, but his guilt was never proved and today he walks free. However the film does not focus on the investigation, but rather provides a convincing (on screen) theory of the way things happen, of the motivation and reasons of the crimes. It's a dark story about moral misery and personal crisis in a family of super-riches. The problem is that it's hard to define and possibly the distributors had a hard time advertising the genre and the story of the film. Crime stories fans will find themselves watching for more than half of the screening time a family drama, romance (the film starts like kind of a 'Love Story') quickly turns into disarray and domestic violence, reality does not necessarily make into cinematographic truth.The best reasons to watch this film despite mixed reviews and not a very high mark on IMDb is however acting. Ryan Gosling can hardly do wrong on my taste, and here he is facing a complex role, in which he accompanies his deeply troubled hero from young age to late maturity, from the picks of the easy life of the New York socialites to the abyss of the life of a fugitive and transvestite. The even better news is that there is even better acting than Gosling's in this film and I refer of course to Kirsten Dunst's role as the loving wife whose dream of marrying the nice and rich guy slowly descends into nightmare, and to the veteran Frank Langella who injects character and complexity in the role of the family father who is much more than a (anti)-moral symbol. At the end of the day and of the film the artistic truth of this story comes from a different place than the factual truth.