Popular reviews

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  Review by sydney ★★★★ 2

  a thriller about christmas at the mall that's 25% crime and 75% beautiful women throwing themselves at weird and possibly sociopathic super nerd elliott gould...incredible, iconic, revolutionary

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½

  “I always wondered what it felt like to be shot. It hurts a lot.”

  Elliott Gould! Christopher Plummer! Susannah York! Extremely young John Candy! Curtis Hanson’s screenplay! Shocking plot twists! A Hall of Fame caliber death scene! An extremely Canadian shopping mall! Where has this movie been all my life?!?

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★½ 28

  “The Silent Partner” is a fitting title for a film that could be called one of the great unknown masterpieces of Canadian cinema. 

  Directed by native Vancouverite Daryl Duke and penned by eventual “LA Confidential” director Curtis Hanson, “Partner” is a slow burn thriller that effectively builds towards a still-shocking incident of brutality. 

  To be honest, I didn’t think the Canadians quite had it in them. 

  Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer star as two men from equally nasty sides of the same dirty coin. One is a greedy, narcissistic bank teller. The other, a greedy, narcissistic bank robber. 

  Duke never misleads the audience into believing there is a way out of these crimes and misdemeanors that will benefit anyone but…

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★½ 14

  "I always wondered what it would feel like to be shot—it hurts a lot."

  I've been putting off this review in the hopes that I'll suddenly like this film better ten minutes from now, but you know "Time's winged chariot" and all that. 

  Carping about the lack of quality leading roles for Elliott Gould in non-Altman films is a favorite pastime of mine, so it would please me to report that I loved Daryl Duke's The Silent Partner. However, the best I can muster is a conditional fondness for this curious Canadian thriller/romance. The adequate screenplay was written on spec by a then-marginal Curtis Hanson, who was denied his request to direct the film. 

  Gould's Miles Cullen is a forlorn…

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  Review by Branson Reese 1

  This movie is the exact pace, length, and tone you want from a 1978 Elliot Gould vehicle where Christopher Plummer robs a bank dressed as a mall santa. It's the minimum amount of funny you'd be expecting from the Overton window your mind instantly created from reading that premise but that ended up working out for the best. I like when movies trust me to fend for myself with finding things funny. Keeps me engaged. Even into my thirties getting up and wandering away remains a threat with me and movies.

  My only complaint is that the movie keeps trying to insist that things are closing in on Gould, that people are starting to suspect that he's up to something. I disagree. I think he was doing a very good job -as good as anybody could've done in this situation- and the movie should've given him a break.

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  Review by Lou (rhymes with wow!) ★★★★ 8

  Elliott Gould as Elliott Gould. Christopher Plummer as Bad Santa. A dangerous cat-and-mouse game. Who will come out the winner? Who is the biggest sociopath? Who couldn't be happier to have dumped his 7 kids at Julie Andrews' place? Find out in the most festive X-mas movie since Die Hard.

  RIP Mr Plummer

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★★ 10

  I remember it was a very hot end of August day back in 1977. I was 18, and I had just recently moved in with my girlfriend at the time. She and I worked together at Rogers Cable … her in the community channel as a playback operator, and me in the Hotel Pay Per view division doing the same job. For extra cash, she would occasionally work as an extra on movie shoots. She told me she was going to be working this day on a film that was being shot in the newly built Toronto Eaton Centre. The Eaton Centre was about halfway between our apartment and work. I was working the evening shift that day, and decided…

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★½

  Christopher Plummer wears eyeliner and is evil. Wonderful and nasty.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 11

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  I was enjoying this right up until they fridged a woman with almost no remorse. It shifts the film in several ways that take away all the fun: it's a deeply misogynist trope to make a woman a prop whose purpose is to be killed to serve the plot of the men; it changes the stakes from "getting caught" to "being beheaded"; and it strips away any hope of making our protagonist likable.

  The brutal beating of a woman at the beginning is also a pretty awful moment, but at least the character who does it is imprisoned for it (until he isn't) and shown as a villain. The murder turns Miles into a co-conspirator in the death of a…

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  Review by anna nomaly ★★★★½ 1

  Despite being relatively unsung, The Silent Partner feels crucial to the legacy of film noir, continuously echoing Old Hollywood and Melville, spiraling outward to Mann, Friedkin, Wright, and countless others. The movie I kept thinking of, however, was Drive, another airtight caper with a strong romantic element and unexpected bursts of graphic violence, yet its most impactful point of comparison is the inescapable melancholy of Elliott Gould’s Miles. Navigating a particularly bleak holiday season, his loneliness preys upon his intelligence and channels it into a larger scheme, one last-ditch effort to carve out some happiness and save himself from a life of isolation. Watching him find out exactly how much his opportunism costs proves to be as moving as it is suspenseful. One for the Christmas canon!

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★½ 9

  "I feel as though I know you very well."
  "Then you know I'm ready to kill you."

  A big thank you to Criterion Channel for gifting me with an unexpected December delight in the form of The Silent Partner, a Canadian thriller in which meek bank teller Elliott Gould matches wits with evil mall Santa/bank robber Christopher Plummer (his guyliner is really poppin', it must be said) and things just get weirder and weirder as they play a cat-and-mouse game with each other across Toronto. I'm here for peak Gould in one of his most compelling performances ever, imo, plus Plummer digging into an impressive well of sociopathy and an early role for John Candy as (what else?) one of…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 2

  Terrific little Canadian thriller. This time I was amazed by how director Daryl Duke immerse us in the 9 to 5 bank daily job (with special attention to office politics) and how all the physical detail plays off on the tightly plot cat and mouse games between Eliott Gould and Christopher Plummer. Curtis Hanson excellent script goes a bit overboard on letting Gould get lectured by his boss about how banking is “the most important job there is” in the end, but otherwise it anchors the action very nicely. The Silent Partner also remains one of 70’s North American cinema more interesting explorations of wounded machismo with the 50k in stolen money achieving a mythic quality far above its actual…