ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Married Baby Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Deanna There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Catherine Cotton Happenstance Happenstance is a romance movie. The movie gives many scenarios of people lives who comes from different walks of life. The movie Happenstance is centered on one girl starring Audrey Tautou (Irene) a young girl who seems to be miserable about her life as a young woman. She encounters an old lady on the train who believes in Horoscopes to be true when it comes to fate and read her horoscope and a young gentleman played by actor Faudel as (Younes) who also have the same birthday as Irene wants to hear more about his fate of finding love one day. Eric Savin (Richard) believes if certain incidents happen it is fate. He is struggling making the decision to leave his wife or stay. Eric Feldman (Luc) has no directions about life and looking for an easy answer for life.The main focus to me is on The Destiny Man played by Gilbert Robin who shows up in different angles of the movie to speak destiny about each individual in the movie. The scene when he tells the boy throwing rocks to miss throwing the last rock thru the fence. He shows up periodically in the movie to give it interest and keep you watching to see what is going to happen next. The music in the beginning brought some suspense to the part of the guard and the dog; the music corresponded well with the lighting in the scene and the old vigilant lying on the ground. Overall the movie was alright the music made the movie more come alive. The emotions of the actors/actress did not show any type of happiness about their lives they were very slothful throughout the movie which made it a little boring and plus it was not in English just the subtitles so it made it sort of difficult to view the film and get a sense of feeling from it. The dubbing was horrible could not understand a word without looking at the subtitle in English. I would compare this movie with Old Boy basically the same plot and theme but just in a different country, very close for as the emotions, the dubbing was horrible could not understand although they spoke some English in Old Boy but the movie had a little more action in the story line and both movies although foreign both ended in finding there happy medium in life despite their circumstances.

Roger Burke Narratives – whether written, visual or poetic epics – generally try to avoid too may characters; readers and viewers, after all, can be too easily overwhelmed by trying to keep track of who exactly is who. This is especially true in film, I think, simply because we cannot easily go back to refresh our memory in a cinema. Viewers like myself, however, don't have that problem because we see all our films on DVD or VHS.A year ago I was introduced to Audrey Tautou, a French actress, whom I first saw in The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain (2001) and later in A Very Long Engagement (2004), both of which were finely crafted and complex stories with a large cast of characters. This earlier offering exceeds the others in both ways: more characters and more complexity.Now, other directors have used those techniques before: Robert Altman with The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001) and others; Paul Thomas Anderson did the same with Magnolia (1999). Stanley Kramer did it with A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in 1963, a comedy of almost epic proportions. The difference with this film is, first the director lets us 'see' inside the head of some of the characters and second, some scenes are repeated as means to refresh the viewer's memory as the story flip-flops between different time periods.The basic – the core, so to speak – story concerns a young woman, Irene (Tautou) who is told, by a fellow commuter on a train, that she will meet her true love on that day. This occurs in the first few minutes of the film. The clever irony at this point is that Irene doesn't realize that the young man opposite (Gilbert Robin) may be that 'one true love'. And, nor does he...They go their separate ways with neither realizing the potential significance of their close encounter. However, chaos results throughout the rest of the day, not only for the two young people, but for the rest of the characters who appear in a series of cleverly constructed and interwoven vignettes that all seem to be going nowhere, and yet...If the story were simply that, it could tend to be boring, and even quite predictable. Not so. The script and the director rip into our expectations with a host of innovative scenes that are all too commonplace, but which are turned into believable, extraordinary events that allow the two possible lovers to meet again. For example, the next time some bird poo from the sky drops onto a book or paper of yours, consider your alternatives; two characters make an obvious choice that must occur before Irene and her man of destiny meet again. Or what about a stone chip flying onto your windscreen? Consider again what would happen...All of that is interesting enough. What was more interesting for me was assessing each new man who came along and trying to decide whether this guy was THE ONE for Irene, or whether it was, in fact, the young man on the train. That kept me guessing for a while.I'll let you think about that, should you see this delightful romp.Recommended for all.

MartinHafer This isn't exactly a great film, but I admire the writers and director for trying something a little different. The film's main theme is fate and small, seemingly insignificant things that can greatly change the future. In some ways this reminds me of the film SLIDING DOORS, though instead of focusing on one random event, seemingly random stuff happens repeatedly and each one helps build to the cute conclusion. Plus, an odd bald guy seems to understand all this and he talks about this during one brief scene--like he's some sort of omnipotent being but there's absolutely no explanation of him in the film (like the two guys that fight each other in the clock tower in THE HUDSUCKER PROXY).The DVD jacket shows just Audrey Tautou. This is capitalize on her success in AMELIE, though she is only one of many actors in the film and there is no one starring role. The pace is brisk, the acting fine and the conclusion isn't bad at all. The only reason I didn't score it higher is that some of the characters were a bit uninteresting and I think the movie could have perhaps been tightened up with a few less subplots.

ThurstonHunger An admirable attempt that winds up about as charming and magical as calculating a checksum. Still to create a "love story" wherein the main characters never speak to each other was an interesting feat. Ultimately I got the sense that the director didn't want us to attach to any one character too much for fear that we would lose track of the plight and the path of the cosmic pinball connecting them all.Other films have traced the vagaries of existence, I'll never forget "Slacker" and its camera-as-transmittable-disease approach. That film, and others had characters that drew you in with more than a powerful pout and a pop star. Also the idiots in that film were more reckless than wretched. Here we have some despicable folks...One of them is, pardon my (lack of) french, a dick. Indeed that is how he is introduced to us, full frontal and head on. We've also got a heartless mother, a selfish roommate, a compassionless store clerk, a petty thief and a liar. Well at least the liar does have a bit of reckoning, and provides some humor along the way. At various points in the film, popular methods of charting the fates are engaged. A horoscope, tarot cards, a palm reading, a strange scrambling of the letters of a name, I don't think there were any tea leaves to be read. These methods are generally dismissed, but the intricate criss-crossing of the crasser crowd does help to guide our stars towards a more star-crossed pairing. Will they meet or miss by the width of a butterfly's wing??More importantly, will the audience care? At the end of the film, I found myself more intrigued by a bald character who we meet during another game of chance in a park (when "le penis" stakes his actions to the toss of a pebble). His bald comments and clear voicing of intention make him stand out like a lucid dream.What the hell is he doing? Is his act of volition meant to taunt us, the invisible voyeurs in every scene? Or is he god...not playing dice with the universe, but loading the pebble? I'm afraid I'm making this film seem more interesting than it was...the battle of will versus fate versus karma versus various crystal balls, like the depth of the characters never quite gets to the foreground.But perhaps by my not enjoying this film so much, I will not tip as much the next time I go out to eat, so your roommate will come home in a crabby mood, so you'll not go out to the Bottom of the Hill together, instead you'll rent a movie from the bald incarnation of Zeus at your local video store who *intentionally* will slip this DVD into the "Slacker" box you thought you were going to rent.And you'll love it...But in case that doesn't happen...5/10