The Elevator: Three Minutes Can Change Your Life (2015)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Overrated and overhyped

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Following the path started with DEADLINE, Massimo Coglitore, Sicilian director, debuted at Tao Film Fest, with THE ELEVATOR independent film produced by Riccaro Blacks. A courageous film, unusual, in English, with excellent acting, great photography and beautiful music, with which Coglitore likes to wink at genre cinema, the suspense. But here we are faced with a film that has its own life, its own soul, no reverence or blinking but only a film made impeccably. Coglitore lends conscientiously to THE ELEVATOR, a film that directs so beautiful and very personal from the technical point of view. Impossible not to be charmed by the basic colors of the photography, that icy green, unsaturated distinguishes the lift and that amazingly does not kill the color but enhances it in order to create the ideal setting in which the characters move to represent a hypothetical, violent chess game, a quiz here, based on primitive instincts. There are many themes, instinct for survival, power, revenge. Extraordinary and magnetic interpreters Caroline Goodall and James Parks where around them prevail only human ancestral impulses. A well-written film by Mauro Graiani and Riccardo Irrera, with a clipped role tailored to evergreen Burt Young. The lift of the film, a few square meters of pure claustrophobia, imprisons Jack Tramell famous American TV presenter, isolating it from the outside world. It 'clear charges of Coglitore the ills of modern society. Men tend to ghettoized, close in sophisticated prisons in which they themselves are the jailers, isolating themselves from the outside world, and the various issues. The woman burst into the comfortable life of the famous presenter, catapulting him on a journey into the unknown, where one misstep means risking their lives. different social realities, among them, but something links them, a thin wire, a terrible secret. Coglitore deftly changes the order of the game and reverses several times their parts, with a strong dramatic where violence - exploding at night in that elevator of an elegant New York -It seems to arm themselves in the hands and thoughts of everyone, without exception.

The Elevator has superb lighting, an innovative use of cinematography in only a few locations and superb acting that is able to hold your attention from the first to the last frame. It jumps right to the inciting incident within the first few minutes, and the bloody fight between the protagonist and the antagonist is heavily suspenseful until the last scene. The superb dramatic action is well synced with the careful psychological crafting of the camera shots, always giving the audience a different look of the scene, even though the characters are at the same place.James Parks and Caroline Goodall are truly amazing at their parts. Overall, The Elevator is truly remarkable for being a smaller budget feature, filmed in the United States by an Italian producer Riccardo Neri and the Italian director Massimo Coglitore.

I assumed this was a low-budget student-made film, based on the number of ratings and reviews, so I was not expecting anything good to come out of it. There were certainly moments that broke my suspension of disbelief; moments in plot that made no sense, ADR that sounded off, and brief moments of unbelievable acting, but overall, it was better than I expected.In contrast, the main cast was phenomenal, both in performance, and in recognition. Imagine my surprise to see that an international director doing his very first feature-length film roped in three world-class actors.In all honesty, it was the acting that held the entire thing together - as you may expect from a film set almost entirely in an elevator.It was definitely slow to get going, though. It wasn't until the half-way mark that the plot actually got interesting. Occasionally things would happen that offered no value to the story line, and until the forty minute mark, a lot of it felt like filler, like the movie wasn't going to be long enough, so more scenes were added.Nothing was more annoying than thinking something interesting was going to happen, only to realise that nothing was happening at all. I began to get bored after the opening sequence.That being said, if you can endure the first act, you may be pleasantly surprised by the second, as things begin to pick up the pace, and the characters really begin to develop and take on their own stories.In the end, I wasn't impressed by the actual plot, and its conclusion. It was an interesting idea, to be sure, but it made for a rather dull conclusion, when it was revealed what it's all about.Basically, I was pleasantly surprised by the film, but only because I expected a no-budget indie film.

This movie reminded me of the 1991 movie "Closet Land".Movies with a minimal amount of actors can sometimes be overwhelming with the lack of on screen charisma, but these actors are powerful enough to draw my attention for the limited amount of time they have to tell their story.What I like best about this movie is the ending leaves you with the question, "What was said in the middle of the movie?" If you had seen this in the movie theater you would have left with an unanswerable question. Classic move on the writers part, and classic movie for people that like movies.