Product Details

• Actors: Guy Pearce, Piper Perabo, William Fichtner, Steven Michael Quezada, J.K. Simmons
• Directors: Mark Fergus
• Writers: Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby
• Producers: Bob Yari, Bryan Furst, Chris Miller, Dave Gare, Ernst-August Schnieder
• Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Language: English
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 encoding (US and Canada only)
  PLEASE NOTE: Some Region 1 DVDs may contain Regional Coding Enhancement (RCE). Some, but not all, of our international customers have had problems playing these enhanced discs on what are called "region-free" DVD players. For more information on RCE, click here.
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Studio: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
• DVD Release Date: November 27, 2007
• Run Time: 101 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000VECADU
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #67,990 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• For more information about "First Snow" visit the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)

Editorial Reviews

Guy Pearce (Memento, L.A. Confidential), Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly) and JK Simmons (Thank You For Smoking, Spiderman 1-3) star in this intriguing thriller about a man whose life spins out of control after psychic tells him his days are numbered. After his car breaks down in a desolate town, a slick salesman, Jimmy Starks (Pearce), visits a fortune teller (Simmons) to kill some time. But the psychic’s ominous reading sends Jimmy’s life into a tailspin when he learns that his life will soon end, but he is safe at least, until the first snow of the season. Now, with his ultimate fate looming nearer, Jimmy becomes obsessed with revisiting his past in hopes of changing his destiny before it’s too late.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "You Put Yourself on This Road...And The Gods Laugh Harder", December 17, 2007

By 

"Rocky Raccoon" "Hey, Doc, It's Only ... (Wild, Wild, West) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: First Snow (DVD)

The trouble with fortune telling is that you don't get the whole story. Even seers have limitations with the fortunes they dispense. This is the premise of another chilling suspense story starring Guy Pearce in a maverick role for which we've become accustomed since `Memento' Memento. Sharply written by Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostly (sp?) and keenly directed by Mark Fergus, 'First Snow' has to be one of the edgiest and most suspenseful thrillers of the year.

Jimmy Starks (Pearce) is stranded at a remote garage. His car needs servicing, and he's like many impatient businessmen on the go. He can't get repairs immediately, so he's stuck there for the evening. Moseying into the honky-tonk bar, he finds an opportunity to see a psychic in a nearby mobile home. Vacaro (J.R. Simmons, Peter Parker's boss) vends his futures according to the funds, but is quick to pick up on what Jimmy can afford. This piques both his interest and his skepticism. Soon he shares a stream of fortune: He'll be on the road before the next day. His pro basketball team, the Timberwolves, will win decisively, and he'll receive a windfall from Dallas. In the midst of their meeting, Vacaro's clasped hand shakes and trembles until he lets go. Vacaro is shaken and gives Jimmy all of his money back. Throughout Jimmy sees the experience as entertainment. All but the first proposition sounds preposterous, and the only thing that seems amiss is the refund...until fortune's hand plays out for him.

Leo, Jimmy's business partner, is a skeptic. His explanations square with most of ours: Jimmy has a Timberwolves' bumper sticker. It is the power of suggestion. If you go looking "under every rock," [fortune] is bound to show up where he tells you. When playing car games as a child, if you say, "Spot the Volkswagons," you find them all over the place. Jimmy must find out for himself, so he returns to the fortune teller for more answers. This time a somber seer tells him he hasn't long to live. He is safe until "the first snow".

There are many ways to accept this news. One is to take advantage of life like a terminal patient. Another is to fight for life. Jimmy chooses the latter. Ominously, we see near misses and a foreboding message in the mail. He first rashly blames a Mexican associate (Rick Gonzales). Then he finds out about an old friend and business partner, Vincent, is out of prison on parole. He seeks his mother to find out more. He rashly goes to his mobile home and only draws more attention to himself. Calling the police, missing work, investigating his wayward friend, and trying to drive until he misses the "first snow," he stops to take stock of matters. Then, he must decide whether to keep running or to face his future.

Much like an updated `Twilight Zone' adventure, `First Snow' plays upon our curiosity with tight and tense scenes that quickly get and keep our interest. After seeing this movie a comparison to `Premonition' Premonition (Full Screen) proves that execution and editing can be crucial to a film's success. Gripping like `Wind Chill' Wind Chill just before it, `First Snow' offers one bracing and suspenseful chiller.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Taut noir thriller, April 27, 2007

By 

LGwriter "SharpWitGuy" (Astoria, N.Y. United States) - See all my reviews

This taut little thriller, directed by first-timer Mark Fergus, is a real gripper with intelligence to spare and some seriously powerful stuff. The protagonist/anti-hero, Jimmy Starks (Guy Pearce in a role that hauntingly echoes his work in "Memento"), is a salesman/con man who easily slides in and out of legit selling and shady conning. Pearce carries this off beautifully, and is ably abetted in his downward spiraling tale by J.K. Simmons as Vaccaro, the strangely prescient soothsayer, William Fichtner as Jimmy's friend Ed, and some really great unknown actors in other supporting roles, principally the actor playing Jimmy's boss, who will hopefully go on to do more work on film (he's terrific).

Jimmy accidentally meets up with fortune teller Vaccaro who accurately predicts a win by a local college basketball team that Jimmy's bet on, as well as a windfall from an on-the-level business deal that Jimmy's involved in. What Vaccaro does not predict is the riveting, ever-darker series of events that ensue when Jimmy finds out that a former partner of his in a crooked scam, Vince, is now out on parole from a stretch in the slammer.

For my money, this is the best American noir thriller of the year so far, and would make a great addition, once it's out on DVD, to anyone's library of neo-noirs. The ending in particular is really strong--always the mark of a well-made film.

Try not to miss this. It's great.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Your fate lies on every road you take, December 7, 2007

By 

ThirdShift (Las Vegas, NV) - See all my reviews

This review is from: First Snow (DVD)

In the city of Damascus a man went to a seer and asked his fortune. The seer said, look to your affairs, Death comes for you tonight. The man thought he saw Death in the city square later that day, so he fled to Aleppo. No sooner had he arrived than he was met by Death, who said, I was surprised when I saw you today in Damascus, for I was told to take you in Aleppo.

Guy Pearce returns as smarmy salesman Jimmy Starks, who is told by a fortune teller that he has "no more road, no more tomorrow." Exactly how and when is not revealed, but he has until the first snow. As this is New Mexico, Jimmy could possibly live until a ripe old age. Jimmy writes the old coot off as a con man, until the predictions came true one by one.

This movie is as much philosophical musings as a noir thriller it was billed as. Do we want to know the date of our death? Or how we will die? Every moment of life is lived while willfully ignoring the certainty of death. Why eat, work, brush your teeth at all if that fact looms constantly over every thought? Humans have to put it aside to get into a car, a plane, go skydiving. All of us think: we WILL return home tonight. Some may say they want to know when they will die, so they can put their affairs in order, say good-bye, but will they really? It's a paradox, we want to know our future so we can change it.

Jimmy began to see every event as a possible mean for his dispatch. The hangup calls could be a busted telemarketing auto-dialer, or is it an old friend who Jimmy sold down the river, calling for payback? The paper target in the mail could be a prank from a worker Jimmy fired, or does he really mean business?

There's a great scene when the small flakes begins to come down and Jimmy peels off in his car to hole up in a motel, sitting by the window clutching a gun and watching the outside behind the slats of the blinds. Then it really snowed, and the next morning the whole landscape is covered in white. There's no avoiding it now, it snowed, and he can't hide forever. Jimmy stumbles out of the motel, and throws the gun away.

This movie has a similar feel to Fargo: the desolate roads that stretch on endlessly toward the unforgiving mountains, the wind-eroded landscape of the desert, the humanity dwarfed by a crushing sense of inevitability. I'm not so interested in the other plot of the childhood friendship gone bad, although it provides the thriller element and contributes to plotline of Jimmy's growing paranoia.

The director let the story unfold at its own pace, some may say it's slow, but it's no slower than necessary. Jerry Bruckheimer would have Jimmy tear down the fortune teller's trailer in 5 minutes demanding to know what he knows, but Mark Fergus lets Jimmy go from a doubter to a wavering believer, and then to an angry and then finally broken down man. Some films are character study, First Snow could be its sub-genre: character-in-situation study. This is a very good film, but not a great film. Despite having most everything in place, the whole is not as good as the sum of its part. Why? Because for all its elaborate setup, it does not tell you more, or give you any more insight than the fable quoted at the begining of this review.