RipDelight This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Bessie Smyth Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

benturkalj When I first decided to watch 'The Bank', I really new very little about it, only that got some pretty good reviews and had two of Australia's finest actors in it. Afterwards, I can say that it offers a very well structured and acted piece of work, with a very neat twist towards the end.What is most important about this film, though in many ways it is a mystery, is it's focus on greed, and how incredibly focused one has to be in the business world. Wenham, who plays the part of a brilliant mathematician who has developed a formula for anticipating the stock market, is constantly challenged by the 'banks' CEO into forgetting all morality for a buck.Overall, there's a great deal of great characterizations in this fine tale, but revealing anything else about the flick would probably ruin it for most, so all I can say is that I recommend it to anyone who can find it.

catherine-b I liked the movie, but was terribly disappointed in the ending.The premise of the film was good, but has been done quite a bit. Some of the plot twists were very good...and a few really threw me. There was enough suspense to definitely keep me interested.It was an interesting twist on a concept that I previously felt had been overdone. The writer made this part work. The "bad guy" was underacted yet overdone by the dialog. A rock could have delivered that performance. The lead actor was quite good, however, and made this film worth my 7 out of 10 rating. I'd like to see more of his films.I probably wouldn't purchase the movie, but I would watch it again if it was on.

tresdodge A large corporate bank takes on a young Mathematics PHD boffin who insists that with funds he can fully develop a theory that predicts the movements of the stock market. Not a bad watch at all, fine acting, a pretty good story and nice cinematography bring together a thoroughly credible piece.The bank here is the archetypal 'unelected private tyranny' that exist in our times, where they can bully governments, cross borders and refute any kind of ethical principles in the name of greed and profit.The head of the evil organisation is played very well by Anthony LaPaglia who is utterly convincing and puts in the best performance of the film. In addition, the lead David Wenham is also fairly good and his beautiful love interest Sibylla Budd is not bad either.I quite enjoyed this movie, each scene looked like a lot of effort had been put into setting it up and directing the actors. The overall feel of the film was very effective for the subject matter but it was missing something that would make it truly memorable and a great film. The ending was not bad but overall the film was just not substantial enough Worth a watch

Spleen It's an open secret: Australian reviewers are dishonest. Perhaps they don't mean to be. But it's as if they conceive their duty to be to "support" Australian films, to persuade people to see them, rather than to tell the truth about them. One result is that they place themselves in the position of the boy who cried wolf: when the rare Australian film comes around that IS worth paying to see, that IS as good as they routinely say Australian films are, that IS worthy of being placed alongside any other of the same kind from overseas - their words carry no weight whatever. I doubt many of us believed the critics who praised "The Bank". Why should we have? But for once they were right.It came from nowhere. I have the vague feeling that writer/director Bob Connolly is famous for something, but I don't know what, and his meagre IMDb filmography is no help (it says he's never directed before). But he's come up with a taut, tense, muscular, beautifully proportioned, INTELLIGENT screenplay (one of its more minor virtues is that the dialogue never lets it down; I particular like the exchange between the protagonist and the woman he's about to have sex with: "Shouldn't we get to know each other first?" "What if we don't like each other?"), and he directs it fleetly, with assurance and an exactly right firmness of touch. It's clear he LOATHES banks. Perhaps this is what makes it work: perhaps the sheer strength of his passion is what gave him the arrogance he needed to be able to stride through the project without setting a foot wrong. NOTHING lets this film down. The musical score is good; the cinematography has that slightly disagreeable sparseness one expects in an Australian film, although in this case it's so apt that it's not disagreeable at all. David Wenham is easy to like yet sufficiently opaque.Perhaps the best compliment I can pay "The Bank" is that the few developments which look, at first, to be the clichéd mistakes that B-grade thrillers routinely make yet which a film otherwise so good can be forgiven for making, turn out to be sources of strength: retrospectively, they're justified, not mistakes at all, sometimes even insights. For example (SPOILER! SPOILER!): aren't grieving parents annoying in films? In the world of movies, once one has lost a child, one can do what one likes - be rude, peevish, immoral, petulant, violent, a walking time bomb - and be forgiven for it. When the father loaded a rifle and went hunting for the managing director of Centrebank, my heart sank. Anthony LaPaglia's corporate character is utterly loathsome, and yet at this point, I was cheering HIM on and hoping that he would somehow defeat or outwit the threatening father with the rifle; it helped that everything he was saying (I couldn't care less about the death of your son, nothing you can do can make me, shooting me will do nobody any good) was in fact both reasonable and true, and the fact that he had the courage to speak the truth at this moment was one of the few things that reflected well on him. And yet, this is precisely what makes the scene work! The film turns out NOT to pat its characters on the head for performing acts of revenge. Bloodlust is NOT rewarded; sober assertions of equality are. Yes, the father got revenge in the end, but the fact that it was revenge turned out to be beside the point - he only got his small reward (and his larger reward of being able to put the matter behind him), when he showed a willingness to forswear revenge altogether, if he couldn't exact revenge in a way that was otherwise justified.And (MORE SPOILERS!) we see that the hero must accept exile - possibly a bitter or empty exile - in exchange for his revenge. (Had he stayed in the country, or got the girl after all, or become a hero in anyone's eyes, it would have struck a false note.) His scam was like the French Revolution. It's what the villains deserved, and it's fun to see them get their comeuppance, but we're not invited to accept that it was, in the end, a good thing.