Mortal Thoughts [HD]

Better than its reputation
First of all I have no idea why this was named "Mortal Thoughts." More appropriate would be, "Fatal Lies" or "An Inadvertent Confession," or maybe "Desperate Friends."

Be that as it may, this is a superior thriller mainly because the story is compelling and the acting is first rate. Demi Moore who plays Cynthia is just outstanding. She commands the screen with her beautiful and expressive features and her great natural skill. If you don't like her, I guarantee you will not like this movie because she dominates the film. She is as vivid and unforgettable as an Al Pacino or a Betty Davis.

As an aside on the career of Demi Moore, I want to say that it's a shame for her that her off-screen personality is not well liked, which in large part accounts for the fact that she is one of the most underrated, although one of the most often seen and hardest-working stars of the last fifteen years or so. This movie is an example of how she is ignored. The plain fact is...

A superb thriller/drama with a terrible miscalculation
Alan Rudolph's Mortal Thoughts is a drama about murder, not movie murder where a hitmen shoots a guy dead with rock music on the soundtrack, but real-life murder, where the killer/killers have a crises of conscience, act with shock, disbelief and paranoia.

The film is set around two couples, James (Bruce Willis) & Joyce(Glenne Headly)and Cynthia(Demi Moore) & Arthur (John Pankow). The film starts out as a pitch black comedy, with Bruce Willis giving an excellent performance as the loud, abusive and downright nasty James. His wife Joyce played by the lovely Glenne Headly is a neurotic who is constantly half kidding her best friend Cynthia about how she would like to kill him. The whole movie is carefully framed with a detective (Harvey Kietel) asking Cynthia questions about one or several crimes. Slowly the flashbacks reveal the events as if they were happening in real time, and the film's momentum builds to a point where it becomes an unbearably tense drama...

Undeservedly Unsung, First Rate Crime Movie
Alan Rudoph started out as something of a protégé of Altman's in the 1970s, assistant directing on The Long Goodbye, California Split and Nashville. Since then he's made a good number of movies of his own that, from what I've seen, tend to be rather uncommercial, slow, serious, painstakingly realistic, sometimes maybe a little dull, but often very interesting films. This is certainly a high point, very interesting indeed and very far from dull. It's a really first rate crime story comprising a long conversation between a detective, played by Harvey Keitel and the central character Cynthia, played by Demi Moore in one of her best performances. The story she has to tell is relayed to us in flashback and deals with her best friend Joyce (Glenne Headly, another excellent performance) and her truly horrible, brutal bully of a husband James (Bruce Willis, also excellent - hateful and frightening but very believable); how Joyce always liked to fantasise about killing James off;...

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