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Not just acting...
19 December 2020
The majority of the user reviews focuses on bad acting performances and although the acting performances truly are a great component to the integrity of a movie, it still can not be the main reason to judge whether the movie is good or bad. So first of all the acting sure is not this movie's greatest virtue, but neither it's worst one. Let us just stay with saying that the casting is debatable.

When you read Life in a year's summary of a plot you know exactly what to expect. You know there is going to be a romance between a boy and a dying girl with a sad ending. You know that. You go with that. You are in a mood for that sort of a movie, or you need some low-brain activity relaxation. Movies like that purely entertain and that is great, we need those kinds of movies.

One movie critic once said that romance movies are the hardest to write. Why? Because the audience knows what is going to happen, yet a screenplay writer still has to come up with a script that in some way is going to differ from other romcoms. This movie could not fail more in this aspect. There is nothing wrong with a few cliches in a romantic movie because you expect them. They are comforting, they are relying upon that the audience just excepts them, the audience won't judge them, they just feel them. But if the movie is stringing them up one after the other the outcome is a bad movie.

You have a wild and lively parentless girl Isabelle with a terminal disease, you have Daryn, a nerd kid who needs some unruliness in his life, but his strict and controlling father gets in the way. You have a loving mother who loves and supports her son's romance and sees a bigger picture. You have two friends who help Daryn to reach his goal. Now imagine a plot. Write down scene after scene (some of them look like a music video - you know driving on a road 15 km/h so the actress' hair is not flattering in the wind), add a few cringes. Then you watch Life in a year. You probably guessed the majority of the scenes in this movie. This movie is begging writers for some sort of creativity but it gets none.
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Purest good in purest evil
1 November 2018
What at first seems to be a boring conventional kidnapping thriller with a teenage girl, who disobeys her mother and gets in trouble just because of that, soon becomes a quite good psychological play between the main three characters.

Vicki is a teenage girl, who is not coping well with the divorce of her parents. While dining with her mum, Vicki angrily admits that she resents her leaving her family and she mentions, that she is going to a party. Mum disallows. Next, there is the sequence, which kidnapping movies evidently can't live without. Vicki sneakes out of her mum's house and goes to a party. On her way, a car starts driving next to her...

From that point on, story develops many drama elements (gore scenes aside). There are 4 key characters that generate the story. One is a not-give-up fighter who is trapped with a manipulative psychopath and a confused life-scarred individual. Another important character is Vicki's mum, who does not get as much screen time as the other three, but just enough to add another aspect of tension - tension that only mother's unconditional love can provide.

This movie is about mother's love and care for their children. On one hand there is a mother, who chooses to leave her husband, but still wants to stay in touch with her daughter; and on the other hand, there is a mother who 'does not yet deserve to be a mother and must first prove it that she can be one.' The movie manages to show the incompatibility between the purest form of love and evilness in it's most twisted way.

The acting of the main cast is absolutely brilliant, especially Emma Booth's. How she manages to portray the most nuanced character of the story is extraordinary and worth pointing out.

Every act of violance is there for a reason and the movie without it would not get the same effect out of the scenes. It is a movie well worth watching because it manages to be optimistic even when researching the lowest hollow of a human nature.
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