With Child (2014) Reviews

• Authentic drama that kept me riveted to my seat!

  chrisewebber2015-04-07

  Totally engaging and authentic film! Vandergriend is a tour de force. I totally believed that he'd been in the construction business for years - a natural. The story was well written and accessible. I love cerebral movies like 'until the end of the world' and 'Deer Hunter'. With Child delivers thoughtful drama while keeping the audience engaged in the show. I watched it with my wife who also related and enjoyed it endlessly. My best friend was recently widowed with four kids under 7. Their lives twisted and turned for the following years with difficult situations (mother's day) and the comedy of trying to take all these kids on journeys - all while trying to keep up with the western expectations placed on parents. As a widower it seems that everyone in the community feels they should be giving advice on how to parent.

• EXCUSE ME!!! WHO IS THIS GUY?

  b-272472018-11-26

  Fair movie concept. However, who is this guy trying to be a girl (Petra)? It ruined the whole movie for me. Not a believable scenario for a movie. I guess everything can't be perfect. Perhaps I'm just naive and dense. If you think so, just ignore this review.

• cloistered lady implausibly loves obnoxious widower

  bruce-samuelson2017-08-15

  5 stars out of 10. As I write, this movie is getting an 8.3 IMDb rating, two favorable reviews from critics, and one favorable user review. Count me blind, but I couldn't see what they did, and I think 8.3 is way too high. Here's the review I submitted to Amazon Prime after viewing it there. The movie's interesting premise was of a relationship developing between a widowed construction worker with a baby girl and a reclusive single lady who hires him to redo her basement. But I couldn't relate to either main character. Up to the very end, the man was obnoxious, rude, careless with his child, and selfish in not putting her interests first. His tender moments with the baby did not overcome this. The woman was robotic and mechanical, almost devoid of visible emotion, and the movie did not make a case for her attraction to such an obnoxious man. Even her physics experiment was misconstrued, being in optics rather than particle physics, and her claim that it proved that she could change the past (presumably her sad, cloistered childhood) by taking action in the present is not how a quantum physicist would interpret it. The most admirable character was the man's sister in law, because she showed genuine concern for the baby and was willing to pay a steep price for her welfare. But the movie portrayed her as somewhat of a villain for threatening legal action to gain custody, along with her husband. Details in movies don't have to be completely plausible, but when the main relationship has such little plausibility or chemistry, that's going too far.