All Good Things (2010)

This movie about someone named David Mark (Robert Durst in the real world) is frightening when you consider how much the protagonist allegedly got away with. In the beginning of the story, David's father says, 'You know - she'll never be one of us' to David, to which David replies, 'Yes, isn't that great?' (or something like that).It doesn't take long before you realized how unpleasant and morally corrupt the Marks family is and you are telling yourself the same thing about this young woman named Katie in the movie. You think, 'God, I HOPE she's never that.'For half of the film, it's an interesting yarn. Then it turns to the kind of thriller horror movie that makes you want to protect your own children from these people. At some point, you also realize this is not a courtroom drama where justice will be done - the narration comes from the courtroom but you realize that it is an interrogation that is more like a checklist than a fact-finding exercise. I am sorry that the person Katie ever got mixed up with this family. I am sorry that the David Marks character happened to be born to this family - in another lifetime, he would be a happy child growing up surrounded by love in a stable environment. Every bad story you have ever heard about landlords seems to be displayed in this film that is really about the corrupt Marks family business. They are hell-bent on squeezing every penny out of the tenants, cutting corners if given any chance to do that, and building the proceeds of their rentals into private wealth. Meanwhile, the tenants survive in squalor. That's probably as realistic a description of the Marks business as you can get. Yet I can't help but think that as the wealthy get wealthier and the poor get poorer, as it happens in the U.S., the poor who pay rent to these people are one step above homelessness - for which they are not only grateful but have given the landlords a chance to paint themselves as heroes in the community. Such it may always be. Such it may have always been! Which is why a certain type of person is drawn to this kind of enterprise.

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.

"My father always said to only regret the things you didn't do not the things you did." "All good things" is a beautiful love story that slowly turns into a psychological drama and ends up as a mystery. A mystery that remains unsolved and ultimately has an open end as big as the Grand Canyon. It's based on true facts and reconstructed according to court documents. In reality, it was about Kathleen Durst, who's to this day still registered as a missing person. She was married to Robert Durst, son of a real estate mogul in New York. On January 31, 1982, the 29-year-old student from Manhattan, New York disappeared. And now, after all these years, they made this movie in which the main characters are given the names Katie and David Marks.They managed to cast two big names for this movie who depict the turbulent love life in a recognizable and convincing manner. Kirsten Dunst played an outstanding poignant role as the lovable Katie who falls for the charming David, played by Ryan Gosling. Personally, I'm not so impressed with Gosling's previous acting. I was afraid I had to look at a straight face again the whole movie. A face where not a shred of emotion is detectable. But that turned out better than I was hoping for and throughout the whole movie Gosling showed a true pallet of all sorts of human emotions: joy, love, sadness, fear, pain and anger. Compared to the two movies "Drive" and "Only God Forgives", Gosling had a load of text to remember. A great interpretation. In particular, the gradual transition from a charming young man into a tormented, aggressive and introverted person was a well played act.Ditto for Kirsten Dunst. She charms you from the beginning with her lovely appearance and highly endearing smile. The desperation that she shows after a certain time and the intense grief she has when she realizes that there isn't a possibility to escape this nightmare, is a beautiful rendition. It certainly is a more subtle role than just playing the girlfriend of Spiderman."All good things" starts obviously with all the good things that are part of human life. Meeting someone for the first time, flirting and the intense feeling of love, thinking about the future, wedding plans ... Everything peppered with joy and love. Life can't go wrong anymore. And then the pink cloud turns into a dark gray rainy cloud. The moment Katie brings up the subject of having children, it's radically rejected by David. This is the reversal in the passionate relationship that existed between these two lovers. And before you know it the atmosphere is ruined and the ghosts from the past are haunting him again. David turns into a depressed, moody and aggressive person. The gap between the two is growing by the day. It goes from bad to worse and Katie begins to explore the possibilities of a divorce. And then she disappears ... And that is until now still the case. Unresolved.The moment the story changes from ​​a touching romantic and emotional movie into a thriller full of mystery, I lost focus. It was suddenly all very absurd and confusing. The chemistry between David and Katie and the built up tension was wonderful to see. But the part about the disappearance and subsequent the judicial investigation with scattered fragments, was fairly vague. The only thing made clear throughout the film was the heavy burden resting on David's shoulders. David withdrawing himself in anonymity because the finger was pointed at him soon after, I can understand. But the masquerade and dressing up as a woman, was a bit too much and unexplained. Ultimately, it's a movie without a clear answer. But It couldn't be otherwise, since that's how it was in reality. And eventually you end up with even more questions than when the movie started! Actually it's a film that belongs in the category of "TV movies about unsolved disappearances" as "The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case" with Anthony Hopkins. A banal movie you can watch again on a rainy Saturday night on a TV-channel.More reviews at http://opinion-as-a-moviefreak.blogspot.be

'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.