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Actors:

Gene Hackman
John Cazale
Teri Garr
Allen Garfield
Frederic Forrest
Harrison Ford

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A paranoid surveillance expert listens in on conversations in which he fears a couple may be killed only to find himself deeper in the mystery.

04/28/2008 (0 of 0 found this helpful)

Interesting but too slow.

The conversation has an interesting story and the way of telling it, but it feels far to slow for a film that is only an hour and a half long. You get what the conversation says early on but it halts, and goes into other boring things. You never get a full relationship with Caul's girlfriend, or his coworker. The story goes to a surveillance convention which does not really work completely. The other surveillance expert gives Caul a hard time really out of the blue and for no reason. As for the main story it does take too long even though it has a slight pay off, the ending does not completely work. The acting is good, and Hackman is great as usual, but on a whole the film does not work.

Rating of
2.5/4 

03/28/2008 (0 of 0 found this helpful)

"He'd kill us if he got the chance."

It is truly stunning that, in the same year, Coppola released both this film and The Godfather Part II. Add in The Godfather from two years prior and the man made three masterpieces in as many years. How can this possibly be the same person who directed Jack? Hackman is wonderful in a slightly different role, a quiet, lonely, socially inept surveillance expert who happens to be incapable of securing his own privacy from invasion. Like Blow-Up with sound instead of pictures, the film revolves around a recording of a couple's conversation seemingly indicating a plot to have them murdered. As Hackman becomes increasingly obsessed with illuminating the recording's meaning, the audience is long kept guessing as to what is going on, given the protagonist's unreliability. And like Rear Wind...

Rating of
4/4