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Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9780767840965
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC
ISBN: 0767840968
Label: Sony Pictures
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Release Date: April 25, 2000
Running Time: 117 minutes
Sales Rank: 153651
Studio: Sony Pictures
Theatrical Release Date: July 09, 1999
Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
It's easy to understand why Arlington Road sat on the studio shelf for nearly a year. No, the film isn't awful; rather, it's an extremely edgy and ultimately bleak thriller that offers no clear-cut heroes or villains. In other words, Hollywood had no idea how to sell it. Director Mark Pellington's underrated directorial debut, Going All the Way, suffered the same fate, essentially because the filmmaker's presentation of suburban America often shifts dramatically within the same film. Characters are usually miserable and bordering on meltdown, no situation is straightforward, and things usually end badly. Arlington Road begins as an astute study of suburban paranoia. Michael Faraday (a face-pinched Jeff Bridges, who spends most of the film on the brink of tears) is a college professor who teaches American history courses on terrorism. He's been a conspiracy freak since his wife, an FBI agent, was killed during a botched raid that feels like a thinly fictionalized reference to the Waco tragedy. After saving the life of his next-door neighbor's child, he initially befriends the family (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), but soon believes the husband is a terrorist. The first half of the film mocks Faraday: he has no real evidence and is not the most stable of protagonists. Despite the fact that it was government paranoia that got his wife killed, Faraday repeats the same type of behavior. Pellington shifts gears in the second half, however, and for awhile, it seems that the film has simultaneously sunk into a cheap, high-octane brand of Hollywood entertainment and undermined its own point. Arlington Road, though, possesses a stunning ending that's a real gut punch, one that may leave you needing a second viewing to catch all of its smartly executed setup. --Dave McCoy
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Lousy, no-thrills, predictable story
The ending was so anti-climatic; because if you've seen these type of movies, you know what's going on, and what's going to happen.
You see how Jeff Bridges is Professor Michael Faraday; being manipulated by the terrorists as he feeds off the death of his wife who was a Federal Agent who died in a shootout (a subtle reference to Randy Weaver family at Ruby Ridge); and his disdain for the Gov't not taking the blame for her death the deaths of others at an IRS building (another subtle ... Read More
Rating:  - Incredibly Tense, White-Knuckled, Nail-Gnawer of a Tale!
Hollywood hasn't made a literate white-knuckled conspiracy thriller like director's Mark Pellington's "Arlington Road" in many moons. The genre ran out of steam in the late 1970s. The late Alan J. Pakula came closest to capturing the essence of the conspiracy thriller with two memorable efforts "The Parallax View" (1974) and "All The President's Men" (1976). Oliver Stone revived the genre briefly with "JFK," but this star-studded marathon as good as it was lacked the visceral qualities of either Alfred ... Read More
Rating: - Awful!
I can't tell you why without revealing a crucial plot twist; however, I can say that everything leading up to the climax suddenly depends on things just happening to work out right. The success of a very intricate plan suddenly becomes dependent on numerous chances that the writer & director must have thought made the plot event more clever. Wrong.
Rating: - An Unintentionally Good Film about the "Far-Right"
Everyone have seen "American History X", which "realistically" portrays what I imagine American screenwriters must think life is like for so-called "Extreme Right-wingers", but while that was a feast of Semitical Correctness gone wild, this particular film is actually quite good. The story centres around a college professor, Michael Faraday played by Jeff Bridges, teaching, among other things, a class on "domestic terrorism". Faraday has recently lost his FBI-wife in an incident involving one of the many ... Read More
Rating:  - Intense But Disappointing Movie
This movie keeps the tension fairly high throughout, but the final half-hour gets unrealistically wacky. Although the very surprising ending is dramatic and then.. well, you may find it terriboy unsatisfying. But, I think the whole movie was overdone. I think the actors acted like they were on steroids, especially Jeff Bridges. At the end, you see why they had him acting so hyper, but still, it wasn't realistic. Also, there was more than a whiff of political B.S. -- as you might expect from any movie ... Read More
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