Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

KnotMissPriceless Why so much hype?

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

SnoopyStyle Hallam Foe (Jamie Bell) is a teen loner. He suspects his stepmother Verity (Claire Forlani) killed his mother. He's also a peeping Tom. He is pushed out of his home by Verity and his father Julius (Ciarán Hinds) and ends up in Edinburgh. He is taken with hotel manager Kate Breck (Sophia Myles) who resembles his mother. She gives him a menial job and he starts peeping in on her. She is having an affair with married employee Alasdair.Jamie Bell continues to show that he is more than Billy Elliot. He has grown up to be a young man. He has a damaged darkness and also a sweet vulnerability. Sophia Myles also shows that duality. The movie never gets too dark. It's really interesting to see Jamie Bell expand his repertoire.

Tss5078 Maybe I just wasn't intelligent enough to get this movie, but to me, Mister Foe was just weird and twisted. Jamie Bell (who I'll always associate with Billy Elliott) was phenomenal as Hallam Foe, a seventeen year old voyeur, whose mother had recently committed suicide. Unable to cope, Hallam leaves for the big city, where he finds a woman who looks eerily similar to his mother and Hallam starts spying on her. I get that this film was supposed to be coming of age, sophisticated, and meaningful, but honestly, I just found it creepy. The film was choppy, extremely slow, and just when you thought something was going to happen, it doesn't. In Mister Foe, Jamie Bell really does show just how good an actor he has become. Aside from that, this movie is just weird.

tedg There's a half in "Chung King Express" that has stuck with me. It is an expression of being and seeing that is close to the core of this film. It is so much better, deeper, that it hampers my appreciation for what is here. I wonder if that is a particularly good thing; if there is something to be valued by the newness of discovered loneliness. I came to this in spite of the male actor, who was involved in one of the most trivial instances of wasted time I've had. He wasn't responsible for it of course, but actors are tokens, and even child actors carry responsibility for bad choices. I came because the filmmaker made "Young Adam."If you do not know that film, it is deep and real. The filmmaker has some insight into the outer limits of accidental couples. Its an adventure in anti romance and resulting sadness. The same thing drives this, but from a more traditional form.In "Young Adam," the context was real life, a river of life that was imagined and received as genuine. Here, the context is moved to a strictly movie reality: the "coming of age" business that we know so well it seems more real. There's some simple wrapping that allows us to accept this: a mother's suicide, but the matter of this is the impossibility of the real in relationships.Sophia Myles — a sort of Rachel Weiss done right — is the woman here, one of them. Her job is to be a character that stands both in real life and this imagined notion of a sexual teacher. We need that for this to work, because we need to see why this kid would fall in love with her, by us falling in love as well. Its all about the tension created between what you know and what you desperately want to.Her job is cleverly supported in the story in three ways. The first and most obvious is that she is the lover and the reflection of the lost mother (because of physical similarity). We even have a "Vertigo" reference to subtly help us in this. The second is that she is observed, watched, the same way we are watching the movie. Its Hitchcock again.The third has to do with her as a sort of casting director who finds roles for her clients, and the boy having this pathology of having to play roles. Its a makeup and costume thing that is implanted in the story, seemingly but not really sensibly.It all works. Its all rather effective, until the writer's copout at the end. Until then, you get entangled in the inevitability of disappointment in love. The more you see it on screen, the more you cling to the opposite in your life. Its a wonderful mechanism and I think unique to film. Seeing damage makes you the fixer.But it is compromised in the Ned when the filmmaker (and no doubt his funders) wanted the thing to end happily, with our hero visibly coming of age. We literally have to see him walking down the street in what we will know as a more mature posture. Stop, dear viewer, before that part. So you can trust in love.Its nice seeing Claire Forlani back in a cleverly sculpted project.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

gradyharp MISTER FOE (aka HALLAM FOE) is another dark film about buried pain and insecurities, much like director David Mackenzie's YOUNG ADAM. Mackenzie is also responsible for the crackling screenplay adapted from the novel by Peter Jinks, the story of a young lad named Hallam (Jamie Bell) damaged by his mother's death/?suicide to the point where he separates himself from the world by living in a tree house, observing his father (Ciarán Hinds) in his too rapid replacement of Hallam's mother with the dangerous Verity (Claire Forlani). A bizarre 17-year-old, Hallam attacks his fears and the world dressed in a manner of beast like costumes, all to assuage his grief for his mother's death. When Verity's behavior drives Hallam from his elegant home, he retreats to Edinburgh, becoming a boy of the streets. One day he spies a woman named Kate (Sophia Myles) who greatly resembles his dead mother and he begins stalking her, spying on her in every conceivable way until he convinces her to hire him in her hotel as a kitchen porter. Proximity feeds obsession and Hallam discovers that Kate is having an affair with a married hotel executive, the result of which is a clash with reality, and Hallam must confront his Oedipal desires with his coming to grips with the reality of his grief for this deceased mother. The discovery he makes with Kate transfers to his relationship with his own family and opens doors for growth rather than maintaining his jail- like mental anguish. The story is bizarre and very dark at times, but the performance by Jamie Bell, well accompanied by those of Hinds, Forlani, Myles et al, make this tale of coming of age fascinating. The art direction (Caroline Grebbell), cinematography (Giles Nuttgens) and musical score (as concocted by Matt Biffa from performers such as Future Pilot A.K.A.) enhance the production - maintaining the high standards set by Mackenzie. Hallam is a lad we grow to love despite his kooky behavior: few other actors could inhabit this role with the élan of the considerably talented Jamie Bell. Recommended. Grady Harp