stephenday-02557 I decided to watch this with the great John hurt and the likeable elijah wood .It really is very dull and am so wanting to turn it off .But am intrigued as to who done it , trying g to stay awake for the next 46 minutes .

teemu-uusitalo So what we have here is an British-ish kind of detective story that has an American exchange student in it. That partially, perhaps, causes a strange blend of both American and British features in the movie.What I really love in British detective stories is that usually they are quite calm, slow and sophisticated. It creates a certain mood to the movies. However, 'The Oxford Murders' basically does its everything to destroy that mood by cinematography that just makes me want to look away. The takes are very much too rapid and hectic. I don't think it suits here at all. This American guy, played by Elijah Wood, also has some sex in the film, which I personally find too intensive for a British detective story. It just doesn't fit there. It felt awkward in this particular film. The movie was directed by a Spanish guy but I believe he knows much stuff about British detective stories if he makes one. The new stuff he tries to pull here doesn't work, though. Of course there is some good here, too. I love John Hurt's performance. Also the strange mathematics are intriguing, everything I do understand about it whatsoever. All in all, I'm not sure what kind of game the film makers are playing here. Everything happening on screen is happening too fast and oddly for this genre. I'd love to like this movie more but many details are too out of place and the whole movie is like a terribly played discord with an otherwise beautiful instrument.5/10

ignatiusloyala As an Oxonian, this film is really painful to watch. It captured little of Oxford's beauty or intellectual wealth. All it has were a bunch of mediocre actors (save John Hurt) that complement an equally terrible screenplay.I don't know how truthful it is to the original, but I find the attempted wittiness in the dialogues very unnatural and clumsily pretentious. It didn't help that it had Elijah Wood and other unexciting actors to deliver them in the most monotonous way possible. Burn Gorman (the Russian, if you can tell) was a constant eyesore whose character seems to have served absolutely no purpose in the story. In fact, the so-called sub-plots and the characters in them were all unpleasantly and purposelessly distracting that one is left wondering what the story is trying to take the audience to. And then of course there's the main plot, which is full of plot holes. Just to mention one, if the series is common enough to be mentioned in a diagram that takes up half a page of a textbook, how convincing is it for Elijah Wood, supposedly a nerdy mathematician, not to figure the pattern out upon seeing the second symbol in the series? I mean, I don't do maths, but hell, I knew the second I saw the 'fish'.John Hurt was excellent and that's all the good things I can say about this movie. Seriously, if the plot of a murder mystery sucks, you don't expect the movie to go anywhere near greatness. Too bad this film happened to be set in my town and my uni, and let's hope the audience won't think we Oxonians are as dumb.

aethomson For the typical products of today's college degree courses, i.e. viewers with a smattering of philosophy or mathematical theory, this would-be intellectual romp might look like durned clever stuff. For viewers with two smatterings, it's more a case of irritating pretension. However, director and scriptwriter Alex de la Iglesia has quite a lot of fun with the arcane foibles of ivory tower academia, such as the rivalry between England's Ivy League universities, Oxford and Cambridge. There's even a gratuitous parody (contributes little if anything to the plot) of the momentous occasion (June 23, 1993) when Andrew Wiles announced at Cambridge the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that he had developed while at Princeton (Refer IMDb's "Did You Know?" above). Yeah, that's the flavour of the piece.Is anyone unfamiliar with the final proposition (#7) in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus"? Here is the Pears/McGuinness translation (and more people ought to read this sentence and heed it): "What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence." Now you know. A self-parodying John Hurt has been invited to overact the role of Arthur Seldom, an Oxford don promoting his latest book - we certainly needed another weighty tome about Wittgenstein. Martin (Elijah Wood) is a brainy nerd (girls fall for him but) who's come all the way from Arizona in the hope that Prof Seldom will condescend to supervise his PhD studies. However it doesn't look as if his degree is going to get any further than some verbal point-scoring and blackboards getting filled with incomprehensible equations. Jim Carter grumbles away, endeavouring to fill the shoes of the late John Thaw, but a charismatic Inspector Morse he ain't.Aw forget it. Enjoy the story. It's not bad. Some decent lines of dialogue are provided for some competent actors (we don't get to see enough of the splendid Anna Massey - you can guess why). There are nifty insights about the unintended consequences of our trivial actions, or for that matter our best-laid plans. You might even decide at the end that the whole thing made quite a lot of sense. There are ingenious twists, that get ingeniously untwisted and then ingeniously retwisted. What's not to like? (You may want to watch it a second time, to spot the tricks.) BTW, that fluttering butterfly deep in the Amazon jungle triggering a hurricane way out in the Atlantic is an urban myth. If this movie "The Oxford Murders" inspires you to get into chaos theory, James Gleick wrote a book about it; and the Gribbin family business (popularisation of science) has a title, "Deep Simplicity" - a lot easier to read than Wittgenstein.