Best movie of this year hands down!

The first must-see film of the year.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

As usual, Paltrow brilliantly draws you into the story. Needless to say, all of the actors in the film deliver this regalement well, making you feel each and every emotion. While the tale itself is sad because it deals with the death of a loved one, there is a happy ending.When someone close dies, it does drag you through so many emotions brought on by the numerous contradictions in their lives. Facing up to these challenges makes us all either better or worse. After watching this film you might figure out or wonder which road it really is that you've chosen.

Some plays are never meant to be adapted onto the big screen. David Auburn wrote a very powerful Pulitzer-prize winner and as result, it became another drab, drippy Gwyneth Paltrow starring vehicle. It's a shameful disposition that everyone will forget about the play and will only remember this slushy film directed by John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love"). The final product consists of a cornucopia of of tiresome compromises and an abundance of cuts that will leave you scratching your heads.There are many reasons why "Proof" lacks life but there are two main faults that stand out more than the others. Firstly, Paltrow is forced to play an emotionally distraught lady which can be described as a role that's outside her parameters in her acting. If you remember her "Sylvia" she plays a brilliant poet with suicidal tendencies who came across as a level-headed person who's penmanship is virtually flawless. Here in "Proof", she's once again playing a harried person who's a mathematical wiz who fears she might be losing her mind. Once again she keeps her sanity in tact while hiding her feelings from the public.Though she's a very intelligent person and hasn't become full-blown insane as we speak, but her moods tell a completely different story. Calling on someone who's about to breakdown, her emotions stem from morose, frustrated, depressed and drab. There's really no emotional changes in character and what you see in her character is what you get. She's either sad, very sad, full-blown moody and just plain frustrated about her depressions. There's really no feel-good about this movie at all.The other thing that irked me the most about "Proof" is that director John Madden just ignored the elements that this movie started as a play and making it lost the roots that it started from. If Madden wanted to open up the story like he did, more panache could have been necessary and opened up more to the audience to get their attention. What he gives us are a bunch of snippets of pointless soundtrack intervals with Catherine (Paltrow) riding her bicycle that lack in point or significance to the movie and just drags on the dramatic tensions this movie has in store for us.From the beginning, Auburn was not really given much creative control since he was under the collaboration of Rebecca Miller. Since he knew his characters better than any of the other crew members, it would've been wiser if he chose a director who was more adept in technique. Instead the script was under the pen of a mundane writer whose previous work is featured in other films.In following the tradition of the original play, the setting takes plays days after the death of Robert (Anthony Hopkins) who was a brilliant mathematician who's final years was spent fighting a mental illness. We're first introduced to him while talking to his daughter, Catherine on her 27th birthday. But she acknowledges that he's deceased. He seems passive about it, which indicates that he's probably just a manifestation in her mind.The rest of the supporting cast includes Jake Gyllenhaal as graduate student Hal who starts digging through Robert's archives. And there's Hope Davis who plays Catherine's estranged sister Claire who makes it her initiative to become a prominent guardian to Catherine. Claire might be the closest to being the leading antagonist. Sure the sympathy is towards Catherine, but her character is so drippy, I find it hard to feel in every way sorry for her. Not only is she bit cuckoo at times, there are moments where she just creeps me out at times.The script has some memorable scenes like funeral eulogy that has a negative impact on Catherine that never fully contributes to the movie. The title of the movie stems from the esoteric mathematical breakthrough found in his desk. The penmanship whether it will ever be revealed is the climax of the story. However, it's the scenes where Catherine's flashbacks and hallucinations that really stand out. The father\daughter chemistry between Paltrow and Hopkins truly stand-out. If only David Auburn had more creative control, this movie could've been all the more better.

Getting together a talented cast (Gyllenhaal and the ageless Anthony Hopkins) to create such an insipid and boring movie... what a waste ! And to think that the scenario is adapted from a play, one doesn't want to imagine what it must be like. The script clearly lacks depth, there is not much going on with the characters who are dreadfully superficial and under-exploited. The lines are robotic, the actors are badly directed, the mise-en-scène is flat and the cheap pseudo intellectualism and melodramaticism oozing from this scenario are cringe-worthy. At the end you just feel you've been going in circles and lost 1h30 watching this completely uninteresting movie.

Gwyneth Paltrow was great, Anthony Hopkins in this supporting role was almost perfect, although he looked too old for the part (63 years), and this may be Jake Gyllenhaal's best movie. The product is ruined through being over-dominated by flashbacks, and by rushing the relationship between the two main characters.The story is designed to put you into the position of the boyfriend, Hal: You are supposed to believe as he does, that the professor, being an icon, towered over the current generation, and would always do so. This in order to set you up in believing that the boyfriend would be pushed into asserting at the crucial plot moment that the breakthrough paper Catherine (Paltrow) gave him to read was probably the work of her father, the Professor and not hers, and that her claiming it, was stealing it.This is the setup for a number of memorable scenes of hysteria for Gwenneth Paltrow. It's true that after starting her graduate work, she sacrificed years of her life to take care of her debilitated father. If taken out of the context of the sister Claire's sudden takeover of her life, the plot would all make sense, but because her design is to remove Catherine from Chicago to New York, in a "soft" wicked witch act, Gwynneth decides to play sick in order to play along and avoid the shame of having hooked up with someone that could disabuse you of your best work the morning after.This is where the weakest moment of the film comes. The characters are all weakened at this point of the plot, and they can never recover. It is now Paltrow's job to look as weak and abused as possible for the rest of the film, barring a couple of seconds in the flashbacks. The dominating obsessive sister from New York must have one more scene, to finally overcome Paltrow's last attempt at personal integrity. Finally the audience is invited, through flashbacks, to sympathize with the dying, demented professor, as he attempts to convince his daughter that he is getting his intellectual mojo back again. All of this is syrup, until we arrive at the moment of truth, when Catherine must literally run from the airport, desperately attempting to find Gyllenhaal on campus, since she is now alone, with no other friends, locked out of her former house by her sister, who has already completed checking her off of her "todo" list. Simply setting up this moment with a stronger relationship to Harold would have sufficed to save the movie. Instead we get one flashback with Hopkins as a teaser after another, many with duplicated footage. What really makes me angry, is thinking that it could be possible that the footage that might make this film hold together could have been shot, but was eliminated in order to get more minutes of Anthony Hopkins onto the screen.