A man's daughter a high school teacher who is accused of abusing her position of authority with a student. When Veronica rebuffs Jim's attempts to secure her early release, Jim begins to take out his frustrations through his work as a food inspector.... (Full plot summary below)
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A man's daughter a high school teacher who is accused of abusing her position of authority with a student. When Veronica rebuffs Jim's attempts to secure her early release, Jim begins to take out his frustrations through his work as a food inspector.
Leave your thoughts about Guest of Honour.
| The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Kate TaylorThe restaurant story is wonderfully taut, with Egoyan in full control of his always extravagant imagery. |
| RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyGuest of Honour, a knotty memory play and character study that, not unsurprisingly, screened at last fall’s Toronto fest, is a gratifyingly solid work that benefits from first-rate performers and a knowing location nose for the scruffier corners of Hamilton, Ontario. |
| The PlaylistStephanie WattsWhile the non-linear structure of Guest of Honour makes for a more thrilling watch than if it had played out chronologically, the story can be uneven and unsatisfying in places. |
| IndieWireDavid EhrlichA riveting but utterly ridiculous melodrama about the burden of guilt and the value of bunny shit, Atom Egoyan’s “Guest of Honour” layers one absurd turn on top of another with the confidence of a veteran architect, and yet — even at its most perversely entertaining — this very unpredictable movie only feels as if it’s working in spite of itself. |
| CineVueChristopher MachellBuried underneath the convolutions, the mistaking of melodramatic sensationalism over psychological reality, there really is something of a real emotional centre that just about makes enduring the rest worth it. |
| The New York TimesBen KenigsbergThe 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 several story shortcuts . . . ensure that the characters’ anguish feels more constructed than organic. |
| The GuardianXan BrooksI’m not convinced it amounts to any more than the sum of its parts, but the parts are intriguing – and some are possessed of real power. |
| The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyGuest of Honour feels like a failed attempt to tame the unwieldy story of a complicated novel. But in fact it's an original screenplay, which means Egoyan has gone out of his way to create the overly fussy structure, perhaps in a bid to lend the psychologically wobbly drama some weight. |
| The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloEvery so often, Egoyan takes another stab at the offbeat, achronological, weirdly intimate mode in which he originally specialized, but the spark never quite fully ignites. Guest Of Honour, his latest effort, is decidedly that sort of low-wattage Egoyan classic, serving up familiar preoccupations and structural curlicues—minus any inspiration. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreThat makes Guest of Honour more unsatisfying than bad, more polished than it could be in many ways, but sloppy in ones that count — namely the script. It’s a textbook case of a “fascinating failure.” |
