RipDelight
This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.
Merolliv
I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.
Lucia Ayala
It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.
Bob
This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.
0isin reilly
This film is touching in so many levels as it deals with so many issues including life ,death and everything in-between. I am not going to spoil anything so I am just going to say that it is about a young boy growing up in an old people's home and a man living there dealing with his regrets. All the cast were wonderful but especially David Morrissey and Michael Cain. I think this is one of Michael Cain's greatest performance to date but lets not forget about Bill Milner and Anna Maria Duff who also gave great performances. The chemistry between Michael Cain and Bill Milner was very good and really does make the film the heart-warming comedy- drama that it is. A wonderful film that I would highly recommend to anyone.
MartinHafer
Have you ever seen a film that has wonderful acting but is so utterly depressing that as you watch it, you're tempted to stuff your head into an oven? If not, and you actually want to, try watching "Is Anyone There?"--an incredibly depressing film starring Michael Caine and a young actor, Bill Miner.Edward (Miner) lives in an old folks home run by his parents. Basically, the place is full of people either waiting to die or who are out of touch with reality--a great place for a kid to grow up in, I know. An elderly magician, Clarence (Michael Caine) moves in and at first, he's hostile towards the boy. But the kid is VERY curious (sometime in ways that you wonder if he needs therapy) and eventually the two become friends....and then Clarence dies. Sure, stuff happens in between, but the film is about dying and loss, so this is the main thrust of the film. In addition, the boy deals with learning that his father wants to be unfaithful and he watches a guy get his finger chopped off. All in all, really depressing stuff and although much of this is the sort of stuff we have to deal with, do you really want to see a film like this? Great acting but utterly depressing and awful.
Ron Plasma
A pleasant sort of film, and I'm never really going to criticise anything with Michael Caine in it am I? Likewise I'll never hear a word against the lovely Anne-Marie Duff, who always gives Gromit a run for his money in the acting-by-eyebrows-alone stakes. How she finds time to write all those poems I'll never know.But I just can't get a theme together for my review other than some shot at "if you ever wondered where all old actors go – it's a film about an old folks' home in Yorkshire". Yes, so soon after Clint's moribund hero I now have Michael's grey-stubble–and-all retired magician. Do you think I am being drawn to them? Seriously though, this is undemanding stuff, yet somehow uplifting to see all the where-are-they-nows. But – and if for no other reason, this is why you must see this film at some point – prepare yourself for an excellent centrepiece scene with a stage guillotine.Ron (Viewed 12May09)
sp2303
This is a truly awful film. Caine spits and gurns his way through the film as though he is doing facial exercises but in his defence the script is so poor that there is little else he can do but chew it up and spit it out with a look of complete boredom on his face. The lines are thrown around like ad-men's ideas and the odd witty line is so painfully contrived that it practically has a party popper attached to it. The characters are so thin that they rival the elderly resident's skin for transparency and the shovel loaded with emotional reaction is so heavy that it shows every time the film picks it up.Leslie Phillips is grotesquely patronised by this film and his many esteemed acting colleagues left to wither in front of our eyes into an embarrassing dirge. Sadly, it is the rest home from hell for the audience.The only thing the film delivers is how dead magic can be in the hands of an inept magician. Save the old actors... don't go!