Two Brothers

LA Weekly Walter Chaw

Annaud presents a meticulously structured fable about the importance of family, particularly the relationship of fathers and sons, to both man and beast.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

There's something simple yet miraculous about watching these beautiful animals interact with the wild and each other, even if their actions are being manipulated for the sake of drama. Annaud has taken his film's message to heart: He knows when to get out of nature's way.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

That Annaud and his deft production team create believable dramatic characters without compromising the dignity of the animals they've borrowed as stars -- is the striking (and sometimes unnerving) achievement of a film that also swoops and loops through fairytale hoops.

Village Voice David Ng

As in "The Bear," Annaud eschews animal voice-over and visual F/X in favor of live, almost wordless action. The result is the humanization of animals and the animalization of humans.

Dallas Observer Luke Y. Thompson

Tigers are such rare and beautiful creatures that you could just film them running around an enclosure for an hour or so and many would pay to see it. Annaud adds much more, and has made a compelling story that's truly for the whole family, without being overly sentimental.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Only the tigers, beautiful and dangerous, maintain their integrity. By staying true to themselves, they make nothing else matter.

Chicago Reader Hank Sartin

The result is that virtual oxymoron, an intelligent family film.

Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell

Charming, Kiplingesque fable.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Alan Niester

The kind of movie that kids used to flock to on Saturday afternoons in the forties and fifties.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Annaud is a filmmaker who often works with a bare minimum of dialogue. Yet his storytelling is so strong and emotional that words are barely necessary.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Watching them, you realize how far computers still have to go in accurately depicting the play of muscles as beasts run, crouch and leap. Though Annaud doesn't cut to them for cute reaction shots, as weak directors do, the tigers show near-human fears and affections.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The animal action is often gripping and suspenseful. As a whole, a giant step beyond Annaud's earlier animal movie, "The Bear," a more gimmicky film of 1988.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Yes, it's all terribly hokey. But once you accept the premise as a conceit that allows the director, Jean-Jacques Annaud, to offer an intimate, utopian vision of the animal kingdom, Two Brothers succeeds as an inspirational pastorale and passionate moral brief for animal rights and preservation.

Variety Derek Elley

Combo of some stunning animal direction (courtesy of ace trainer Thierry Le Portier) and exotic period setting somewhere in French colonial Indochina charms when the quadripeds stalk the action but creaks when the bipeds open their mouths.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

In the best tradition of Annaud's work, Two Brothers works as an engrossing outdoor adventure and quasi-documentary.

Austin Chronicle Marrit Ingman

The film’s simplest pleasure is its naturalism – the illusion it creates of observing the animals undetected.

USA Today Mike Clark

Borderline amazing and borderline dull at the same time.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The result is a reassuring fairy tale that will fascinate children and has moments of natural beauty for their parents, but makes the tigers approximately as realistic as the animals in "The Lion King."

Miami Herald Peter Debruge

The movie's ''bless the beasts and the children'' moralizing is simplistic and skews a wee bit too young, but it's hard to fault a film whose greatest vice is sentimentalizing an animal humans have pushed almost to the brink of extinction.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Honors the power and beauty of these beasts even as it underscores the cultured savagery of the men who are crowding them out.

TV Guide Angel Cohn

Some of the film's more violent scenes may be inappropriate for young and/or sensitive children.

Empire Nick De Semlyen

Good-natured, old-fashioned family entertainment, but Two Brothers never quite manages to strike a successful balance between fantasy and reality.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

The result is schizophrenic, an uplifting film that's truly depressing, a movie about cruelty that tries to be fluffy.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Despite the cunning mixture of live-action footage and animatronic effects in Two Brothers, there's more imagination and wonder in a good old Sabu picture like "The Jungle Book" (1942). Two Brothers is more like a tacky jungle comic book.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

The tiger footage in Two Brothers would make for a solid nature documentary, but because the animals are shoehorned into a narrative, they've been anthropomorphized to death.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The story, which features an apparently lobotomized Guy Pearce as an opportunistic explorer and hunter who learns the errors of his ways, is deeply dull.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Unless you're a lover of tigers, there's probably no reason to see Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers. And maybe not even then.