The Kindness of Strangers

It doesn’t wholly come off, with back stories too thinly developed, pathos and cruelty blending with the whimsy of a New York con.

While the movie works to depict how kindness breeds kindness, even in the cruelest of environments, it spends much of the time watching its motley collection of lost souls chase their own tails.

Too much of the kindness in “Strangers” feels sentimentally story-dictated rather than born of profound human observation, leaving you with mild, woolly good feeling but little to contemplate or chew on.

Scherfig’s latest effort pursues something naively magical, only to end up with a mélange of miscalculated, cheap sentiments.

Despite its feel-good title, The Kindness of Strangers is a rather bleak movie, one so tied to the miseries of its characters that it’s difficult to see the point of it at all.

As a supposed snapshot of life in the unaccommodating big city, and of the humane gestures that can soften that harshness, it feels utterly synthetic, not to mention a romantically "European" view of New York that's sheer nonsense.

In spite of it all, the cast members do themselves justice for the most and I couldn’t help but be charmed by Riseborough’s wide-eyed decency as she hosts her frequent “forgiveness” meetings–not to mention be seduced by Nighy’s signature suave detachment.

Bill Nighy is a great actor. I like to watch the movies of this actor. Watching the trailer of this movie, I thought it was a good movie with many events that touched the hearts of the audience. I thought it would be a well-made, well-directed, well-made film.

The film exposes its theme, but only that. It feels so empty that it can't compensate for the cast's attempts to make the story more convincing and the message is right there, exposed simply to the public and surprisingly it doesn't feel moralistic but it does feels unrealistic and absurd, and what's left isn't not enough to hold the entire film because you just don't get anything worth remembering.