In the Cut (2003)

Featured Audience Ratings

• Lady D

  
  This film makes even better viewing second time around, an Erotic Thriller that pushes boundaries and risk taking with a woman who takes voyeuristic fantasies to a new and intense level, beyond her comfort zone, this sort of parodies Meg Ryan's acting career too, this being… More
  This film makes even better viewing second time around, an Erotic Thriller that pushes boundaries and risk taking with a woman who takes voyeuristic fantasies to a new and intense level, beyond her comfort zone, this sort of parodies Meg Ryan's acting career too, this being beyond her comfort zone in image and typecast roles. A serial killer film to keep the audience focused, almost sub-plotted to heighten the intensity heightens. Great performances all around particularly Mark Ruffalo, enjoyed Jennifer Jason Leigh's character too and Meg Ryan as you've never seen her.

• ♥˩ƳИИ &

  
  Cast: Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kevin Bacon, Nick Damici, Sharrieff Pugh Director: Jane Campion Summary: Frannie (Meg Ryan) is a New York writing professor entwined in an erotic affair with a police detective (Mark Ruffalo) who's investigating the murder… More
  Cast: Meg Ryan, Mark Ruffalo, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kevin Bacon, Nick Damici, Sharrieff Pugh Director: Jane Campion Summary: Frannie (Meg Ryan) is a New York writing professor entwined in an erotic affair with a police detective (Mark Ruffalo) who's investigating the murder of a young woman in Frannie's neighborhood. But soon Frannie begins to suspect her lover's involvement in the crime. My Thoughts: "Considering the cast I was expecting better, but it was just so not good at all. The acting was there, but the story and all of the other stuff just was crap. Usually I will recommend a movie even when I don't like it, or care for to much, but this isn't even worth that. Just a pointless, boring, and too long of a film."

• Veronique K

  
  "in the cut" was an erotic novel written by susanna moore before jane campion adapted it into a woman's picture stirred with family drama, romance, trust. gore and sex. i read that damned novel before i watched the picture, which didn't interest me at all for the… More
  "in the cut" was an erotic novel written by susanna moore before jane campion adapted it into a woman's picture stirred with family drama, romance, trust. gore and sex. i read that damned novel before i watched the picture, which didn't interest me at all for the sake of meg ryan (=chick flick).jane campion tends to quieten and soften the brash tone of sadomasochistic perversion in the book, where susanna moore reveals her thick obsession with fellatio and forcible semi-rape fornications. basically the scenario is a literature-teacher accidentally witnessing a woman performing fellatio to a man in local bar when she tries to find a restroom. later she discovers the fellatio-girl is murdered by the man, whom she guess might be the police lieutenant who inquests her for the peculiar tatoo on his wrist. somehow the woman professor ends up bedding this macho lieutenant who is excellent at oral sex while suspecting he might be the ferocious killer who disposes of the fellatio girl. the condition worsens as the professor's best-friend/half-sister has her head chopped off in the bathroom sink, and at the same time professor finds the remains of her friend's jewlry in the lieutenant's pocket after a naughty fling of stormy lovemaking. so she flees for rescue and leaves the lieutenant handcuffed, but unwisely she's trapped in the hands of the real killer. i'm a literatue-major, i cannot help but focus on the book, which is harsher, dirtier and far more nasty then the movie could have ever been, written in a pseudo- stream of consciousness way of first person narration. the book could be a feminist noir for having the woman as the one to collect all the fissures of murders just like the detective in noir, of course, conventional noir is male sap crazing for the femme fatale, and here our woman is drooling over men, her homme fatale with her brazen talks of nymphmaniac desires. the most morbid part is probably that she gets titilated to watch that fellatio sex in the bar and masturbate at night imagining her lieutenant as the head-receiver. she's aware this man could be a pervert, murderer and she gets horny for IT, enjoying his various rough ways of abusive matings as well as the notion of him enslavening her on bed. in the end, even the killer is not the lieutenant but it is very obvious why she gets misled so. (because subconsciously the idea of bedding a killer is quite an appetizer to her, and the mixture of gore and orgasm is quite an turn-on for her)...the passage of her naked revelations of desire is actually quite sickening to read along as if this woman wishes to be FUCKED TO DEATH!! wouldn't the noir men in james m cain's novels, like double indemnity, be also like that? they wish for a taste of the super-cunt then perishes with it as walter cannot resist phyllis, as robert mitchum voluntarily chooses to drive together with jane greer in "out of the past" to rush toward self-ruin. this book surely has one of most jaw-dropping ending for self-ruin. ain't noir always about mascochist's reckless cost on the quest of libido-fulfillments? but the movie is DIFFERENT despite the basic plots are the same. jane campion tenderizes it with a touch of family romance. champion adds the part of the woman's visualized montages of her father proposing to her mom in ice-skating, and her reminiscence of the family past before her dad left her mom with a broken-heart, and that casts a shadow of doubt over her relationships with men. the movie uses that part to reflect the woman's emotional states: when her half-sis is killed, the montage gets deformed into a nightmare of his dad cutting her mom's legs with ice-skater. when she finally survives over the killer's devilish claws, the montage transmutes into her mom terminates the father with a pistol. when she disintegrates the negative pattern of family drama, she could manage to reform a more positive relationship with the opposite sex. meg ryan is far more ladylike than susanna moore's lascivious protagonist in the book, and she acts more like a sympathetically astayed woman who melts with a man due to human frailty and spritual desolation for the lack of a caring father figure. fellatio is only mentioned for the murderous scene and the movie tends to focus much more upon cunniligus to rid off its misogynistic elements.(it's quite an irony such woman-insulting novel is actually written by a woman) jane campion is quite creative to envision ways to joint the genre of noirish horror with the tint of woman's picture, which is about romance and her disorientated journey for affections, but somehow campion might encounter the dillemma of not pleasing audience in both genres. i admire such gritts and courage, and it is indeed pitiful this movie is so under-rated and neglected, even smart critic like rogert ebert cannot really grasp what campion tries to say. i must say "in the cut" would probably be much cooler if it was directed by david lynch, who is quite good at rendering misogynistic neo-noir materials. (ps) due to my usual dislike over meg ryan, i think i'm the only one who is fair enough to give it the rating it deserves without bias. honestly meg ryan and mark ruffalo are much hotter in their nudes than i have ever expected! if the movie is gonna be made as susanna moore wrote in the novel, jennifer jason leigh is probably a much better choice than meg ryan.

• Bruce B

  
  Didn't know that Meg Ryan could be such a nasty girl, and oh boy was she ever nasty in this movie. Each of us posses a nasty side I am sure, But the movie itself is about a serial killer, who is killing young women and butchering them up into small little pieces and removing the… More
  Didn't know that Meg Ryan could be such a nasty girl, and oh boy was she ever nasty in this movie. Each of us posses a nasty side I am sure, But the movie itself is about a serial killer, who is killing young women and butchering them up into small little pieces and removing the head, hummm whets up with that. Anyway movie has a number of twist, I caught ion 1/2 way through who the killer was but I suspected everyone in the movie at one time or another. Its worth a rent or a buy 4 stars Meg you can handcuff me anytime.

• Ross C

  
  A sexually charged murder mystery that was controversial in the US, perhaps for its unromantic graphic sex scenes. As a murder mystery it is very average indeed and the experimental cinematography was kind of distracting at times.

• Film C

  
  Im going to say it was pretty crap but thats because i dont think i fully understood it, it was boring and just pointless and forever going on!

• William S

  
  I strongly suspect this is a film that will benefit from repeat viewing - with it's strange insinuating cock-tease of a plot and morally ambiguous characters, you're left feeling we've only scratched the surface of what is going on here. A kinky and morally twisted… More
  I strongly suspect this is a film that will benefit from repeat viewing - with it's strange insinuating cock-tease of a plot and morally ambiguous characters, you're left feeling we've only scratched the surface of what is going on here. A kinky and morally twisted tale that I really took to. Meg Ryan is surprisingly watchable (who'd have thought Little Miss Bland could be so intriguing??) and so is Mark Ruffalo - killer or not, who wouldn't want filthy sex with him?? Ahem...

• Jens S

  
  Okay, admittedly I was rather tired when I watched this, so I shouldn't be unfair. But I want to believe that a good movie would have kept me awake. A few rather hot sex scenes are not enough to create an outstanding movie. People will always prefer Meg Ryan in the role of the… More
  Okay, admittedly I was rather tired when I watched this, so I shouldn't be unfair. But I want to believe that a good movie would have kept me awake. A few rather hot sex scenes are not enough to create an outstanding movie. People will always prefer Meg Ryan in the role of the nice and innocent girl, she better accepts that. The rest was camera work that tried to look really special, a confusing and boring script and unbelievable characters. Unless you desperately wanna see Meg naked, better skip this wannabe thriller.

• Red L

  
  Never seen Meg Ryan in this sort of sexy movie before.

• Dean !

  
  A dark, gritty and sexy thriller starring Meg Ryan in a totally different role for her. Quite good, similar to the thriller Sea of Love.

• Dean M

  
  This is the first time I ever watched Meg Ryan in her naked & sex scenes. Unsettling and incredibly sexy!

• Luke B

  
  A very underrated film. The performances are perfect, especially from Mark Ruffalo. A slow little mediation on the tedium of life and the terror that lurks everywhere. Meg Ryan is superb as is Kevin Bacon. Slow but worth every second of your time.

• Joey N

  
  Grim, but psychoanalyticaly rich.

• Doctor S

  
  The overriding viewer's & critic's response to <i>In the Cut</i> was "Meg Ryan finally got naked for <i>this???</i>" Which is completely valid. Poor excuse for an erotic thriller, or under any other genre you'd care to categorize.… More
  The overriding viewer's & critic's response to <i>In the Cut</i> was "Meg Ryan finally got naked for <i>this???</i>" Which is completely valid. Poor excuse for an erotic thriller, or under any other genre you'd care to categorize. It even caused me to avoid Mark Ruffalo movies for a long time, and it turns out he's a damn fine actor. But not in this.

• Robert F

  
  Deals with female sexuality and psychology in a way that I couldn't quite wrap my head around, so perhaps it requires repeat viewing.

• hawk l

  
  '70s-style psycho-sexual thriller, adventurous, overheated but grisly, themed around narrowing the sometimes-imperceptible gap between desire and self-respect. Standard fare replete with an ersatz-Silence of the Lambs ending.

• Sunil J

  
  This movie got a lot of negative attention for being Meg Ryan's dirty movie but I thought it was good enough to recommend.

• Jim W

  
  Meg Ryan tries an adult thriller on for size. When I say adult, I mean this is her Basic Instinct. But she's too good for the material, same goes for the Life Time quality movies she makes these days.

• Kevin L

  
  This movie was very weird and dark. It was a very different role for Meg Ryan, but she did an amazing job.

• Anthony V

  
  Extremely sleazy.

Read all 20 featured audience ratings