KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

MBunge This film is like the construction of a very weird and very bored kid on a rainy afternoon when the power is out and he can't watch TV or go on his computer. It's a misshapen entity made out of the cinematic equivalent of Legos, Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, scotch tape and the twist ties off of loaves of bread. Featuring Jennifer Tilly's cleavage and James Caan as septuagenarian beefcake, it's also one of those stories that only has about 25 minutes of basic plot, so they add in another 70 minutes of filler to make movie out of it.Leonard Gray (James Caan) is the agoraphobic and mentally slow building super of a 6 floor apartment building. He's referred to as a concierge in the film, but that's only because this thing was made by Europeans and that's apparently what they call their building supers. Anyway, the movie starts out by making you think that Leonard is going to be the centerpiece of a tale that involves the multiple different lives of the building's tenants.There's Valda (Susan Glover), the middle aged woman who's going a little crazy out of loneliness. There's the young couple, Eugene and Dolores O'Donnell (Bruce Ramsay and Maribel Verdu). Eugene is a bit of a handyman and is infringing on Leonard's territory. Dolores is a drug addict having an affair with another man in the building. That guy is Bill Cherry (Peter Keleghan), who's the sort of dick who has sex with his mistress and is completely oblivious to her disinterest during the act. Bill is married to Donna (Jennifer Tilly), a licensed masseuse. Bill and Donna have a daughter, Holly (Victoria Jane Allen), that Leonard occasionally babysits. There's also the token gay guy, Gilbert (Mark Camacho). At least I think he's supposed to be gay. If he's not the token gay, I don't know what purpose his character serves. And finally, there's the insanely angry landlady named Lilly Melnick (Genevieve Bujold). Her husband dies at the start of the film and Lilly basically never stops screaming at people throughout the rest of the movie.As far as the plot goes, one of the folks in the building gets killed, Lilly yells a lot, Donna and Leonard have sex but not really, and some other stuff happens that has nothing to do with the big secret that gets rolled out in the last half hour of the movie. Then there's the big secret, which might have been surprising but by the time it finally arrived, I had absolutely no interest in anything or anyone in this tale. I won't spoil the secret, except to say it's one of those overwrought Gothic things that might have been believable in a novel 100 years ago but now just comes off as stupidly unrealistic.There are two good things in Jericho Mansions. Jennifer Tilly is quite sexy and James Caan does a good job playing Leonard as the sort of little man leading a little life that other people never really think about that much. Even Caan can't hold his performance together, though, as the story turns into a cross between a bad soap opera and an even worse psychological horror flick.Everything besides Tilly and Caan is either outright dreadful, like Genevieve Bujold doing 90% of her scenes like someone's sticking a cattle prod in her vagina, or ultimately meaningless, like the subplot of Eugene making Leonard feel threatened, which is touched on twice and then forgotten.Jericho Mansions also has a soundtrack of loud, intrusive music that sounds like it's from a totally different movie, flashback sequences that look like they're from the old TV show Twin Peaks and CGI special effects that appear to have been done by a high school A/V club.This is one of those films that isn't interestingly bad or entertainingly bad or amusingly bad. It's just bad. Don't watch it.

jotix100 Alberto Sciamma's "Jericho Mansions" is a strange film that hides a secret we are not going to be told until the end. This is a story of a building super, who is evidently slow, or mentally challenged. The film is mildly engrossing and it shows a director whose sensibilities seem to be rooted in European film making.At the center of the story we have Leonard Grey, who we realize early on has a mental problem. The landlady, Lily Melnick is a horrible woman who seems to get pleasure in berating her employee. We wonder, why not fire him? Well, that's not possible because we discover toward the end the nightmare Leonard has gone through in his life and how the truth has eluded him all the years he was under Mrs. Melnick's employment.James Caan makes a rare appearance in this indie production. He is good as the super that seems to be perplexed by all what's going on around him. Genevive Bujold, rarely seen these days, also makes an interesting landlady from hell. The supporting cast does good work under Mr. Sciamma's direction, notably Jennifer Tilly and Maribel Verdu."Jericho Mansions", while not breaking new ground, is different in the way the story is presented and developed.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** Lying in bed and playing with a paper-clip Jericho Mansions superintendent Leonard Gray, James Caan, tell us the story of what happen in that apartment building that put him in the place that he's in now. Leonard knows only his life as a super at that apartment building and nothing else. In his fifties he knows nothing of what he did up until he was in his late twenties. That's when he somehow became the superintendent of that building. What he did and what kind of life he lead before that is a total blur to him. But two events happened the week before that had his past come back to him and it came back with deadly results. The landlady of the Jericho Mansions Mrs. Lily Meinick, Genevieve Bujodl, had just lost her husband of over thirty years Robert, Pierre Rioux. Shortly after Roberts funeral she got a call from her sister in France Bettina, Lenie Scoffie, via a singing telegram that she's coming over to see Lily for the first time in thirty years. These two events set Lily off in an insane way to get rid of her long-time superintendent Leonard Gray by hook or by crook. Even if it took a murder on her part to do it. You wonder why this hatred and at the same time fear of the meek shy and seemingly harmless Leonard Gray? He never left the building in the thirty years that he worked there! Leonard also seems to be so helpless outside that if he's fired, which Lily can't do because he belongs to a Superintendents Union, he my well die on the cruel and cold city streets. When in desperation trying to get Leonard arrested by the police for stealing her husbands watch it becomes obvious that Lily planted it in Leonard's room. It's then that her whole plan to rid herself of him completely begins to fall apart. Then one evening one of the tenants in the building Bill Cherry, Peter Keleghan, is found dead at the bottom of the buildings incinerator. Lily seeing her chance tries to blame his death, or murder, on Leonard! But with no evidence at all to Leonard's guilt for the death of Bill Cherry and Lily totally unable to get rid of him she starts to lose her sanity and begins to go mad. What's the reason for all these actions on the part of Lily anyway? What is there about Leonard that she's been keeping hidden from him and suppressing all these years? We find out at the end of the movie that the secret that is hidden by Lily as well as hidden deep inside Leonard's subconscious mind have left the two suffering with deep psychological scars. That secret is so terrible that we slowly begin to understand why Lily acted the way that she did in trying to get rid of Leonard all through the film. It was the past that she and her husband so cleverly covered up over the last thirty years that was about to the surface. Now everything that Lily did to prevent it from coming out was as useless to stopping it as a sea-wall is in holding back the Atlantic Ocean. And it's that dark and hidden secret that was to lead to her doom.

t-mieczkowski I agree with the previous comment regarding this film as an attempt to merge European sensibilities .. and I might I say, as a genre piece this works very well. Much better than most of the studio crap being tossed about. I felt Mr. Caan's performance was intense and incendiary; tragic and tortured.I was impressed by this film. If you enjoy fantastic, interesting cinematography and the lush pulp of a thriller picture, I highly recommend this one. That said, it does have its limitations. But it is an effectively powerful flick overall. I feel what has been referred to as "roller coaster" cinematography and moving the camera as these filmmakers have done, established a visual empowerment for the viewer that makes this seemingly direct-to-video indie a compelling watch.