Imagine you have an interesting idea, and the studio wants a 100 minute film from you. Only problem is, your idea only fills up about 30 minutes before it's exhausted.

There is a solid thriller in here somewhere, but it's bogged down with so much unnecessary shite that it doesn't even know what it's trying to be anymore. There can only be so many twists and turns before you're in an entirely different city. There's only so much meandering I can take and if it's at the point where I'm thinking ''Can we just, like, move on?'' then the eagle has already landed my friend. I will say I enjoyed the direction, the blurring, colour, adhd riddled camerawork, more screenwipes…

It's a very bizarre experience for me to come out of a film so high on its superficially engaging effects that I'm ready to sing its praises, but days later all I want to do is rip it apart. Trance made me feel like I was watching an intelligent and sophisticated thriller. It's only after some distance that I realized there's nothing left to figure out, no questions to ask, nothing to discuss. It just sort of sits there like a really pretty but empty box with the word "MYSTERY" written on it.

Toward the end, it reveals everything you need to know or wondered up until that point and then shows a bunch of repeated scenes from earlier in…

Danny Boyle is a filmmaker capable of adapting his style to practically any genre. In his relatively short directorial career he has tackled everything from feel-good family fare to ambitious outer-space science-fiction and he brings this restless and inquisitive spirit to his latest film. Trance, based on Joe Ahearne’s little seen British TV-movie, is an agitated psychological thriller packed with twists and logic-defying revelations perfectly suited to Boyle’s directorial sensibilities.

Like a smaller scale Inception, Trance is a heist movie inside the mind of an auctioneer suffering from amnesia. James McAvoy stars as the auctioneer involved in the audacious robbery of a Goya painting and who suffers from short term memory loss when hit over the head by one of…

Danny Boyle’s Trance is very engaging but it fails because it tries to be too smart for its own good and too explicit so as to dumb down the viewer’s intelligence.

The first 50 minutes of the film were so exhilarating and is without a doubt the best part of the film. The theme felt similar to Inception. Even the setting of a heist and the group formation looked similar. But Boyle’s thoughts and presentation are always special, different and minimalistic. The film is powered by some great camerawork and editing which Boyle’s relies heavily on to take his stories on to the next level. Those two departments in Boyle’s films do so much to cover up for the relatively…

"No piece of art is worth a human life. - Simon

Trance messes with your head as much as it messes with its protagonist's head. And that gets messed around an awful lot. On top of severe injuries to his cranium, there's false memory implants (or are they?), hypnotism and hallucinations being forced into poor Simon's mind. But is all what it seems on the surface? No...

Danny Boyle is a personal favourite of mine, so I was immensely excited for his first twisty thriller since his debut, Shallow Grave. Boyle has also been an incredibly stylish film-maker, so I was intrigued to see what he would do with this. Expecting both intelligent twists and highly fashionable style, Trance delivered.…

What a grotesque movie this is. At its heart it’s basically a bleak, bleak noir, however unlike the best noir there really isn’t a single person in the whole thing that you want to see do anything but die (until the final few minutes that is, by which point it is far too late). I think there’s something interesting lurking in that screenplay about frail masculinity, but it’s not well explored enough overall, and again, the characters are all so repulsive it’s hard to give a damn.

I think another major, major fault with it is that the three primary players are all fatally sort of miscast. Vincent Cassel is too naturally villainesque, Rosario Dawson is hopelessly, and hilariously out…

Directed by Danny Boyle, Trance sees an art auctioneer (James McAvoy) become mixed up with a group of criminals led by Franck (Vincent Cassel) and partner with a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson) in order to recover a lost painting.

This is a film where the ideas are better than the execution when it comes to its narrative. What starts off as an inventive spin on the heist genre, quickly morphs into a trippy convoluted and over the top messy third act that throws reveal and reveal and twist after twist at the viewer. The film begins interestingly with fourth wall breaking and a fast pace that introduces the characters and establishes the situations clearly. As the film progresses there are some creepy and otherworldly…