3 Needles: Critic Reviews

Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, 3 Needles might have been to the AIDS epidemic what Traffic was to the drug trade.

It's hard to know what exactly the movie means with a lot of the choices it makes, even if, ultimately, it means well.

As a movie, 3 Needles amounts to unclean entertainment at best.

Only the African story feels complete, while the Chinese story is gloomily hopeless and the Montreal story is just a bad idea. 3 Needles is not about AIDS; it's about the exploitation of it.

Broad in scope and at times visually stunning, [director Thom] Fitzgerald's project is ambitious but lacks cohesion.

[A] well-meaning misfire.

By the time the movie returned to Africa, it had lost me despite its talented cast and its noble intentions.

Sprawling from Montreal to South Africa to China, Thom Fitzgerald's 3 Needles is a great discussion tool for World AIDS Awareness Day that never achieves coherent shape as a three-paneled drama.

The film is unfocussed and listless. Fitzgerald has the ideas; what he needs more than anything is a ruthless editor.

The results can be gripping, but also difficult to follow in some places -- and difficult to swallow in others.

It sometimes produces moments of unexpected power. It also produces a bizarre and fatally uneven movie, veering from black comedy to maudlin religiosity, which seems to have been made in total defiance of both narrative conventions and emotional logic.

Though not as coherent as it might be, 3 Needles, with its stunning cinematography by Thomas M. Harting, is never less than engaging and suggests powerfully the myriad reasons why AIDS, after a quarter of a century, remains so difficult to combat.

As a movie with an important message, 3 Needles is an idiotic waste of time.

great performances and the heartbreaking dilemmas

A marginally involving dramatization of how peopledeal with AIDS in 3 separate cultures

Making serious points about serious issues, the film underscores repeatedly the need for personal and official vigilance concerning "the virus,"

Three riveting dramas about the AIDS crisis set in South Africa, China, and Canada that open our eyes and our hearts to victims of this dread disease.

3 Needles is a case of diminishing returns with the first story of blood running in China the best and the last, set in Africa, the least compelling.

The situations are contrived, the ironies are cheap, and the dialogue is overly blunt.

If nothing else, [director Thom] Fitzgerald has demonstrated how huge a challenge the AIDS epidemic is on a worldwide scale, and how it will take a concerted, intelligent effort to solve it. It'll take a lot more than throwing money around.

3 Needles, Thom Fitzgerald's globe-spanning investigation of the effects of AIDS, may ultimately be a call to unity, but there's an extreme amount of despair and misery before we get to hear that trumpet blare.

Demonstrates that the transmission of HIV has become an uncontrollable global pandemic that feeds on poverty and recognizes no sexual, national or religious borders.

Nothing is as irritating as watching a film which is little more than an exercise of ego; worse is watching one that is about as discrete in its purpose as a missionary in Africa.