Better than the previews led me to believe, which is saying something, but not a whole lot of something. A waify potentially psychologically disturbed woman played Connelly? That's no sign of the apocalypse, that just the way things have always been.
The ending of this movie--and by ending you should be clued in about SPOILERS here--is so badly handled that it nearly negates everything before it. The psychological set up for the primary character was, in my view, totally negated by her action. It was a passive thing to do--essentially abandoning her daughter in a different, but just as real, way as her mother abandoned her.
If, though, her character had been truly crazy, and had a moment of clarity that she was hurting her child, then it would have made sense. But they set up JC as a passive woman and then her moment of action, supposedly redeeming herself and her pain at the hands of her mother, and so the last action had no bearing on her emotional well-being.
Tim Roth was great, and disappeared into the roll, as was the always great John C. Reilly and the particularly evil Pete Postletwaite. As for JC--well, she annoyed me, like her characters usually do, which means that she's playing them right on the button, I would say.
Where we saw it: DVD | We deign to rate it: 55 outta 100