Guest of Honour

Perhaps it's fitting that a film about a restaurant inspector should elicit so many sniffs of suspicion. But there's a playful spice and pungency here too.

It's kind of a mess narratively and psychologically.

It feels scattershot and overwrought, unfortunately.

The director's sturdiest creation in a while.

Guest Of Honour, [Egoyan's] latest effort, is decidedly that sort of low-wattage Egoyan classic, serving up familiar preoccupations and structural curlicues-minus any inspiration.

The movie is consistently seductive, and it makes lovely use of a composition by Shannon Graham that is woven into Veronica's work as a music teacher. But... the characters' anguish feels more constructed than organic.

Guest of Honour might not be the best thing Egoyan has made. But with David Thewlis's affecting and measured performance, it comes close to his heyday of filmmaking in the 90s.

Taking place in various time periods, its tricky structure more garbled than intriguing, this is another recent Egoyan joint that's basically a trashy potboiler treated with a seriousness that only makes it all both leaden and silly.

While it may not ultimately amount to much on a thematic level, Egoyan's latest is a fascinating experiment from a director who has seemingly found the spark once again.

Egoyan offers a clumsy intellectual exercise. These characters stand out like metaphors in New Yorker magazine short-story fiction. Each one is a stick figure in a narrative maze.