ags123 Bad script, bad acting, bad directing. The list goes on and on (so does the movie, for more than two hours). No depth to these unsympathetic characters. Everyone smokes nonstop. Poor attempt at erotic overtones. Just nothing to recommend this snooze fest. Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel can't act their way out of a paper bag. I suggest covering your head with one before watching this mess. And Criterion had the audacity to dignify this film?

FrostyChud I've just returned after seeing this movie and it has messed your dude up. This was my life for the two years I spent with my Milena. The parallels are uncanny. I am kind of nerdy just like Garfunkel...same pathetic physique...but like Garfunkel I have a certain magnetism. Garfunkel's not exactly a wimp...there's some steel in his gaze. My Milena was just as magnetic and beautiful as Theresa Russell...really. My Milena also lived in a sordid, messy, sexy aerie with a big bed, overfull ashtrays, half-read books everywhere. The alcohol? Check. The infidelity? Check. The suicide attempts? Check. The much older other man? Check. The sleazy, disgusting party friends? Check. The late-night drunk calls that may or may not have been suicide attempts? Check. The intense sex that regularly turned into something twisted? Check. Just like Garfunkel I was hooked...just like Garfunkel I had a "together" life...my God, I even study psychoanalysis...and just like Garfunkel there was more than a hint of bad faith in the togetherness I opposed to my Milena's sloppiness. Like Garfunkel, the idea that Milena had other lovers made me crazy...like Theresa Russell, my Milena needed secrets...lies...she couldn't breathe without her lies and secrets.The scene where she sets Garfunkel up with her fake suicide attempt only to loose the full force of her hysterical cruelty on him...check...down to the blows and the broken bottles...and it marked the moment our love died, even if things dribbled on for a while after that. Anyway...you get the picture. You know a movie is good when it shows you things about YOUR OWN life that you hadn't noticed before. That's the secret of a great movie: you feel like it's talking to you and to you alone. I have a feeling I'm not the only person who walked out of the cinema feeling like he had just seen his own life on the screen. Almost everything is perfect. This film is even more disturbing than DON'T LOOK NOW. That is saying a lot. The one wrong note for me was Harvey Keitel. I liked the contrast of his healthy virility with Garfunkel's nerdiness...but Keitel got something wrong. Not sure what...it was certainly a tricky role, and he wasn't exactly bad, but something was wrong.

Polaris_DiB While saying anything like "This director is the best one in the world ever" is always controversial, I have no qualms about calling Nicholas Roeg one of the top ten, and absolutely no trouble calling him my favorite. The more I see from this master of cinema techniques, the more impressed I get.Bad Timing makes an awkward sort of Musician Trilogy with Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth. Each movie is completely different and deals with completely different issues, but each of them star a musician/rock-star in a role that couldn't be done by anyone else. In this case the star is Art Garfunkel, who plays an obsessive psychoanalyst who's powers of understanding the mind help him in no way understand the free-spirited woman he's fallen in love with.Coming 15 years before Pulp Fiction, this movie is edited out of chronology. It's not the first use of this device (some accredit Kubrick's The Killing to creating the approach, but it's honestly appeared throughout cinema history), but it's one that came well before the late 90s when it became popular and, in some cases, cliché. The approach has a completely different use, as well... besides slowly revealing the events leading up to the tragic ending, it also creates a presence in the form of Harvey Keitel's investigator (again?! Is he always to be one in some movie or another?) throughout Alex and Milena's relationship that foreshadows the downward spiral it is going to take.Roeg's previous movies tend to have cuts with very sharp edges to them, and this one is just a bit more reserved. It seems he's learned how to use the zoom he favors so well with the discontinuity editing he's developed to a more subtle and undertoned pace, which is fantastic! I personally prefer the sharper editing of previous features, but to see someone grow as a filmmaker and not be stuck in one particular approach is a good thing. And like all of his movies, Bad Timing is saturated in allusions and symbolism not easily recognizable upon the first viewing. Indeed, half a second after this movie ended, I wanted to watch it again... just like Performance and Walkabout.Another point of interest: the dialog during the scene where Milena was drunk and kept asking Alex "Is this what you want? What do you want from me?" is a bitingly acute representation of interrelationship conflict. It stands with the taxi scene in New York, New York as one of the most blatant and straightforward visualizations of a couple's dysfunction I've ever seen.--PolarisDiB

lionelduffy 'Bad Timing's jagged format, beautiful Viennese setting and Keith Jarrett-led, opulent score create a movie thats as mysterious as it is menacing. A plot comes, is alluded to, told intermittently in flashbacks and arcs and splutters to conclusion but its very much a film of photography and technique. Roeg's structureless style overwhelms a perhaps miscast Harvey Keitel, a struggling (as always) Art Garfunkel (the one pop-star casting Roeg didn't get spot on) and a ravishing Theresa Russell but ultimately wins out as the film lingers long and tantalizingly out of reach long after viewing. The fifth of five in Roeg's golden period and in many ways the most intriguing.