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Heaven
Miramax Films


7.0

based on 31 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 6 votes
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FILM:

MPAA RATING: R for a scene of sexuality

Starring Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Remo Girone, Stefania Rocca, Alessandro Sperduti, Mattia Sbragia, Stefano Santospago, and Alberto Di Stasio

A luminous and haunting love story, layered, in the tradition of Kieslowski, over a probing exploration of the modern world and its moral choices. (Miramax)

GENRE(S):	Romance
WRITTEN BY:	Krzysztof Kieslowski Krzysztof Piesiewicz
DIRECTED BY:	Tom Tykwer
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: June 17, 2003 Video: June 17, 2003 Theatrical: October 4, 2002
RUNNING TIME:	96 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA / UK / France / Italy / Germany

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Here the clinical, stopwatch precision of Mr. Tykwer's explorations of synchronicity and Kieslowski's warmer, metaphysically dreamy speculations about the role of chance and coincidence in human affairs synchronize into a film whose formal elegance is matched by its depth of feeling.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

It's Tykwer's most assured picture to date, and like much of Kieslowski's best work it qualifies simultaneously as engrossing narrative and philosophical parable.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Unusual, unexpected and strangely refreshing. For this movie to have resorted to a familiar action-flick finish with everything explained, pressed and dry-cleaned would have rendered it banal.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Mr. Tykwer's hands the movie changes almost magically from drama to chase to romance. As it does so its moral weight lessens; by the end there is less than what first engaged the mind. What meets the eye, though, is unforgettable.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

The result is both engrossing and moving, a poem about a love that breaks barriers and passes understanding.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

Odd, and awkward in places, but its lyricism and power stay with you.

Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan

Not just love, but maybe an escape from a wretched world. We're not sure, but that's what makes Heaven so inexplicably, intriguingly soulful, even in its most remote and architectural instances.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Tykwer's actors seem completely clued in to his intentions. Both Blanchett and Ribisi give performances so restrained they're almost subliminal.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

The result is a beautifully designed, lyrical fable of a movie, full of God's-eye shots from on high, placing the characters against the Italian scenery and medieval architecture.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Tykwer doesn't aim for the heights of excitement and invention he reached in "Run Lola Run," but he blends an impressively varied palette of moods into an intriguingly unpredictable story that's never short of ideas.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Poetic in its sadness, and Blanchett's performance confirms her power once again.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

It's maddeningly chowderheaded, simplistic, pretentious, and not a little silly. You can't take your eyes off it.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

Touching, transcendent love story.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

A mystical tale of two souls, joined in love but divided in society, seeking redemption and understanding before they pass to another plane.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Blanchett is riveting.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

If Heaven doesn't quite achieve the transcendent power that Kieslowski might have attained, it comes close. One shot in particular, with the couple making love under a tree in silhouette, is a thing of quiet, sublime beauty that is eloquent in a way words never could be.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Too bad Heaven creeps into town when it deserved more fanfare. Consider it buried treasure, a thriller for the art- house crowd.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

An art film without the NYFF imprimatur, Heaven is a peculiar amalgam -- a Miramax package (without the hype), directed by German hotshot Tom Tykwer under the eye of Anthony Minghella, from a script with which the late Krzysztof Kieslowski had planned to inaugurate a new trilogy named for the Divine Comedy.

LA Weekly Grahm Robinson

The final product is so eccentric and resolutely uncommercial -- and so faithful to the spirit of Kieslowski's oeuvre -- that it's hard to doubt the purity of Tykwer's intentions.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

Heaven is so determined to be poetic and beautiful, it comes across as forced and didactic, a lesson in relative morality whose storyline doesn't so much flow as lurch from one stretch to another.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Heaven's tone is all wrong. The movie tries to be ethereal, but ends up seeming goofy.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

With Heaven, Tykwer completes his self-appointment as Kieslowski's heir apparent, but since he has always been a better filmmaker than a thinker, his ideas drift into the ether.

Variety Derek Elley

Sports a lustrous performance by Cate Blanchett that gives the movie much of its final sheen but still can't keep it on the rails as the already flimsy story starts to disintegrate in the final act.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

A great deal of energy is expended on metaphysical ruminations that become ever fuzzier. The film is intended as an allegory, but it works best as a jailbreak romance. In this movie, lowbrow trumps highbrow every time.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

Isn't a bad movie by conventional standards, just a boring one.

USA Today Mike Clark

Heaven is saved only by the power of an occasional hypnotic image.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Turns out to be an exercise in flatulent pretension, puffed up with a bogus, empty "spirituality" and dependent on a plot filled with implausibilities.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The conclusion, clearly meant to feel ambiguously poetic, is distinctly unsatisfying.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Further sad evidence that Tom Tykwer, director of the resonant and sense-spinning ''Run Lola Run,'' has turned out to be a one-trick pony -- a maker of softheaded metaphysical claptrap. It's enough to make you want to see him run again.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

It's a mannered, precious exercise that seems to have less to do with lived moral dilemmas than with the smug piety of its makers.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

Doesn't have the courage of its conceit, only an abundance of bad ideas and worse taste.

The average user rating for this movie is 7.0 (out of 10) based on 6 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

John M. gave it a10:
This is a great film about love. Beautifully shot. Wonderfully directed.

Pat C. gave it a6:
This morality play is not too long, but could have been shorter, since character development apparently wasn't a concern. Blanchett sells her character so well that it is easy to overlook that the character is dysfunctional and spectacularly dense. But aren't we all? This seems to be the premise of the movie. Her wish for the end to come is the most poignant moment in the movie, but after that it was my wish too. When one's life warps into the abyss, given the chance one will eventually want to come out the other side. In this case the other side remains unfathomable.

Chad S. gave it a 5:
The ease in which Ribisi communicates with Blanchette is very distracting. What kind of prison is this? Don't the Italians search their prisoners? This wouldn't matter had Blanchette and Ribisi convinced us of their love for each other. There's a long pause before Phillipa answers Flippo(Ribisi)'s father about her love for his son. Blanchette seems to be commenting on her counterpart's performance, before honoring the script's edict that the schoolteacher is supposed to fall in love with the carabineri. It looks more like codependence, but then she has sex with him. This is the third movie (the others being "The Shipping News" and "Charlotte Grey") I've seen in which Blanchette acts her brains out for a production that lets her down.

Kobus B. gave it a 10:
This is the poetry of moviemaking... The camera is making love to lush landscapes and the acting is brilliant. A masterpiece!

Alessandro P. gave it a 2:
Beside minimal aspects which undermine the plausibility of characters (like the the strong accent with which Mr. Ribisi speaks Italian: despite his name, he is evidently no native speaker), the film is not only an insult to logic and plausibility (which still could be accepted), but fails also in the esthetic transfiguration acclaimed by some critics. The "poetic" images of Mr. Tykwer are average for good European cinema and do not struck for their beauty or richness in symbolic like the ones of Mr. Kieslowski (who had probably made a completely different kind of movie). On the contrary: when the fugitives escape to Tuscany (of course...) the pictures of the landscape and of Montepulciano are so trivial and post card-like as only a kitsch German director could imagine. Maybe as a Tuscan myself I'm too sick to see always this kind of images: it were as say a western movie couldn't avoid showing Monumental Valley to be taken seriously. But the worst thing of all is the absolute incapacity to show some psychological change in the characters. In this sense it is a black-and-white picture of a world in which the bad guys are bad and deserve death, while the good guys are just good, no matter what they do. People in this movie act always exactly the way you would expect them to act. The psychological flatness and the missing of every development in the emotional world of the characters makes it really hard to remain in your chair till the end, which is ambiguos and open as many similar conclusions, but as a filmical scene constructed in such a ridiculous way that many people in my movie theater laughed.

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Heaven Miramax Films

Heaven
Miramax Films