Ameriatch One of the best films i have seen

ChicDragon It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Cissy Évelyne It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Donal Fagan A few weekends ago, I watched Return of the Secaucus Seven again. I first watched it circa 1982, and enjoyed it so much that I brought a different girl to see it a few weeks later. Over the years I rented it on VHS for one girlfriend, and then another, to see. Several years ago I bought the DVD to show my wife, and I probably watch it about once a year. (I do miss that hamburger scene - what a shame!) The film concerns a weekend reunion of a handful of people that knew each other as young adults in the 1960s. Seems that IMDb reviewers can't resist comparing Sayles' small film to The Big Chill, a big budget film about a reunion of people that met in the 1960s. Both groups talk a lot, and share a lot, but they are actually very different films in almost every other way. The RS7 friends are still fairly young, not yet settled in life, not rich or famous, not at all generic types, and not played by familiar actors. I enjoyed Chill, but I have come to think of the characters in RS7 as old friends. I always look forward to seeing them again.

StillThere Soon, it will be 30 years since "The Return of the Secaucus 7" was released. In the time that has passed since its premiere, anyone who has seen also "The Big Chill," the film that is widely considered to have been inspired by "The Return of the Secaucus 7," has enjoyed greater commercial success, often to a point where Sayles' gem is not acknowledged at all.However, despite its so-called "star power" and the slickness of the production, "The Big Chill" pales in comparison with the rawness and reality that is "The Return of the Secaucus 7" - to me, it is vastly superior in every way. Indeed, the film is a harbinger of all that has come since this debut saw the light of day; here are all the elements that have since become hallmarks of John Sayles' entire body of work: originality, authenticity, humor, and the ability to move.This is the stuff of which truly fine films are made; unlike "The Big Chill," which seems to me to be something less than a remake, "The Return of the Secaucus 7" is a landmark.

tremont600 Among subsequent films that seem to "owe" their plots to "Secaucus 7" is the British film "Peter's Friends." All these films, like "Big Chill" add their own twist to the story, but the characters and basic plot seem all too similar to "Secaucus 7" to be coincidence. The movie itself says SO much about my generation, particularly in those 10 or 15 years after college, when we are getting our lives started, or, like J.T., still looking for a starting-point. I always feel that I KNOW these guys! Sayles, generally, is one of those directors who has stuck to his guns and still tells a wonderful story with characters that are truthful. Thank heaven there are little havens like his movies in this world of "sequels" ad nauseum, and more special effects than plot. (I was DRAGGED, kicking and screaming, to see this movie and have never stopped thanking the friend who frog-marched me into the movie theatre to catch this movie. I have since become a hard-core Sayles fan and have every movie of his I can get on DVD.)

Justin Behnke I wish I could put my finger on exactly what it is about films like this that I loathe so much. Return of the Secaucus 7, The Big Chill, Rules of the Game, Gosford Park, The Anniversary Party. One after another, these long winded ensemble reunion/get-together films both bore and enrage me with their awful scripts and even worse acting.Return of the Secaucus 7 is perhaps the best (or worst) example of a genre of film-making that's arguably destined to fail as soon as the opening credits end. It's just an awful, boring script and it's no wonder that very few of the "actors" went on to any kind of a career in film. These people memorized their lines and started filming. There is no passion or emotion in any of the dialogue. I was reminded over and over again of the sequence of scenes in Reservoir Dogs where Tim Roth is urged to memorize, and then make his own, an anecdote about a drug deal. His mentoring police officer tells him that it's not enough to just memorize the story. He has to know all the little details. He has to make the story utterly believable. And as the sequences unfold and he practices telling the story over and over, he is able to do just that. In Secaucus, ALL of the actors read their lines as if they've just committed them to memory. It always seems as though during the conversations in this film, the person not talking is ready to speak their next line before the other person is done speaking theirs. It's an indictment on not only the actors, but on the director.The Secaucus 7 are a group of seven friends who were wrongfully busted and detained on their way to a protest rally of the Vietnam War. This film is a reunion of the 7 (plus a few others) about 10 years later. Nothing too dramatic or exciting, and certainly not anything that most rational people would feel the need to reunite and reminisce for. All of this is revealed in synopsises you may read, and with about 10 minutes left in the film. So we watch these characters reunite for an hour and a half, but don't have any real basis as to what they have in common. At least in all of the aforementioned films above, there is a reason for the gathering of people. This is not a particularly believable reunion.The formula for these reunion ensembles seems to be as follows: Take a large group of pretentious dysfunctional mostly unlikeable middle aged adults with emotional and relationship problems and make them talk to each other about them for two hours. With a bad script. Oh, yeah. I can see why people like them.