A vicious rumour is spreading like fire through the university, three journalism students planted the story, hoping to trace how it changes as it burns its path; but what goes around comes around.

With a young and talented cast, including James Marsden, Lena Heady, Norman Reedus and Kate Hudson; Gossip deserves more credit than it seems to have received.

The story is full of twists and is genuinely compelling to watch and easy to relate too; the direction is pretty stylish and achieves the necessary feel for the plot to play out, and the cast all contribute with solid performances.

It's either been overlooked or harshly criticised by far too many people, come on! It's a good thriller. 7/10

Derrick Webb (James Marsden),Cathy Jones (Lena Headey) and Travis (Norman Reedus) are close college friends and roommates. They are in a communications class with Professor Goodwin (Eric Bogosian). For their final project, the trio ponders whether to start a rumor and track the progress. Naomi Preston (Kate Hudson) from a rich influential family is known to be a virgin who's saving herself. She's with boyfriend Beau Edson (Joshua Jackson). At a club, Sheila tells Jones about a rumor of her sleeping with professor Goodwin and suggests the source is Naomi. Derrick happens to spy that Naomi passed out while making out and Beau leaves. The trio decides to start a rumor that Naomi actually had sex with Beau. The gossip starts to change into Naomi may have been raped by Beau. Detective Kelly (Sharon Lawrence) investigates and eventually arrests Beau. Jones wants to come clean but Derrick claims to be not sure what actually happened that night.

I don't care about any of these characters. Jones should have started out nicer so the audience can really pull for her. It would also be helpful to show Derrick helping Jones and Travis with his money. There are too many things like the club or the massive college apartment or the people or countless trash can fires that seem too fake. The basic idea has potential but it never takes off for me. It has some good turns as a thriller. The believability is never that high. It gets really bad when nobody even listens to Jones. It's kind of stupid. It's a conspiracy for no reason. Jones could easily get Kelly to listen to her if she drops Derrick's name. Why are cops always so stupid? This is written like a sitcom where if people just talked and listened, all the problems would go away. The movie keeps turning and twisting. At some point, the turns becomes meaningless because I didn't care about the characters in the first place.

Telephone...

...Telegram...

...and tell a woman

Apologies for that old fashioned joke but it did make me smile and apologies too that anyone might think it's actually true because I know fine well from bitter personal experience that idle or malicious gossip and two faced chit chat that can affect a life is just as likely to be started by males as much by females . I guess everyone already knew that ?

Interesting to note though that women like this film slightly more than men . I have to confess that I wasn't too keen on it . Now this had nothing to do with sexism and had everything to do with the way the story was developed which centres around rumours of a rape and before you can blink the rumours have spread all over college campus and a student finds himself facing charges . Other reviewers have rightly pointed out that the story is entirely dumb so I won't bother reiterating the points they've raised except to say " What about forensic evidence ? for a charge to be brought " . I also have a problem that it's a movie that's entirely made for a teen market which means the cast is young and good looking and we have to endure the MTV type of filming which totally negates any type of drama