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63
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60
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58
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58
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57
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57
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57
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55
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54
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54
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53
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53
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51
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49
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47
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47
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46
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45
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43
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43
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43
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41
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39
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37
Miracle at St. Anna
36
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36
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36
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35
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35
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35
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34
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27
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26
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24
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20
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15
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82
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82
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81
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80
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80
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79
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78
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76
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73
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73
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73
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72
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72
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72
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71
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68
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68
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66
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66
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65
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64
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63
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63
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63
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63
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62
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62
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61
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61
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57
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57
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57
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57
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56
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55
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53
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53
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52
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51
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50
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49
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47
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41
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37
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26
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Lower Learning
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Very Long Engagement, A
Warner Independent Pictures
FILM:
MPAA RATING: R for violence and sexuality
Starring
Audrey Tautou,
Gaspard Ulliel,
Dominique Pinon,
Clovis Cornillac,
Jérôme Kircher,
Chantal Neuwirth,
Albert Dupontel,
and
Denis Lavant
An extraordinary love story set against the background of World War I.
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
Foreign
|
Mystery
|
Romance
|
War
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Guillaume Laurant
Sébastien Japrisot (novel)
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Jean-Pierre Jeunet
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: July 12, 2005
Video: July 12, 2005
Theatrical: November 26, 2004
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
134 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
France |
| LANGUAGE(S): |
French (with English subtitles) |

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...
100
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
Rapturously beautiful, startlingly audacious and often very funny, the film employs many of the techniques that were used so pleasingly in "Amélie."
100
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
It's a magical film which manages to transport and rivet us in the same highly-imaginitive, breezily playful way "Amelie" did.

100
San Francisco Chronicle
Ruthe Stein
Hauntingly tells a story older than the Odyssey and as timely as today's body count from Iraq.

100
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Unfolds amid the mechanized carnage of World War I. Yet everything in it is personal. That's why it's a masterpiece.

91
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
A unique and masterful film, filled with surprises and felicities and moments of transporting visual power.

91
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
This is a movie that considers graphic violence with a refined taste for the sensuous: Guts spill, blood spurts, corpses stink, but there is a handsome, absurdist humanity to the way Jeunet (who wrote the script with Guillaume Laurant) maps out the crossroads of human carnage and human caring.

90
Time
Richard Corliss
Can a movie have too much good stuff? Not when it's stuffed like this one.

90
Variety
Lisa Nesselson
Told with a blend of visual mastery and emotional intimacy, ambitious venture sustains a special melding of romance and pragmatism that should engage discerning audiences.

90
Salon.com
Charles Taylor
The holiday season's best movie so far.

90
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
In its insistence on the centrality of the war to the collective consciousness of mankind, it's of a piece with "The English Patient," rather than "Saving Private Ryan."

90
Film Threat
Michael Ferraro
The film is near perfect in its attempt to properly mix the irrationality of war in with an interesting love story.

90
New York Magazine
Ken Tucker
When this long movie is over, all you want to do is clap and weep and watch it all over again immediately.

88
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
Jeunet brings everything together -- his joyously poetic style, the lovable Tautou, a good story worth the telling -- into a film that is a series of pleasures stumbling over one another in their haste to delight us.

88
USA Today
Mike Clark
A long movie that almost wears out its 21/4-hour welcome, yet it's full of surprises.

88
Premiere
Glenn Kenny
An epic treatment of epic themes that doesn't soft-soap its audience, but at the same time provides a terrifically satisfying entertainment.

88
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
An emotional powerhouse.

88
Boston Globe
Ty Burr
Flattens you with concussive detail and the awfulness of war; it plays like "Saving Private Ryan" as remade by a Continental mathematician flipping out on Ecstasy.

80
The Hollywood Reporter
Bernard Besserglik
Jeunet provides numerous pleasures, particularly visual, along the way.

80
Los Angeles Times
Carina Chocano
A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.

80
Slate
David Edelstein
The downside to all this stylishness: that A Very Long Engagement is Amélie Goes to War.

80
Empire
Ian Nathan
Inventive and lyrical, A Very Long Engagement is a joyous contradiction in terms: a war-torn romantic comedy.

75
Philadelphia Inquirer
Steven Rea
A Very Long Engagement is "Cold Mountain" with French people.

75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Rick Groen
Certainly long and not always engaging and comes with a predictably basic ending, yet there are unexpected pleasures, moments of beauty and tiny pockets of joy to sustain you through the journey.

75
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
It's an odd, initially jarring mixture of style and subject matter that works better as the film goes along.

75
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
The movie works amazingly well as a historical epic.

75
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
There are many ways to say that war is hell, but few filmmakers have said it with as much imagination, humor, intrigue and humanity as Jean-Pierre Jeunet in A Very Long Engagement.

75
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
Longer than necessary, that is, for the story it has to tell. This flaw aside, the drama is well crafted and sometimes touching, with especially forceful opening scenes.

75
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Starts slowly, but builds to a satisfying conclusion.

70
TV Guide
Ken Fox
The film is a trifle long too long for its rather slim mystery, but in face of so much beauty and invention that's a small quibble.

70
The New Republic
Stanley Kauffmann
Mathilde's story is well enough handled by Jeunet to be endurable, and the rest of the film is a reward.

63
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
It's just exhausting. For all of the movie's sumptuous, eyepopping craft, you'll feel more than a little relief when Mathilde finally reaches the end of her quest.

60
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Sacrifices compelling drama for gratuitous whimsy and big-budget spectacle.

60
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Engagement simply disappears inside its own enormous, intricate and ambitious design.

60
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
Only when Jodie Foster materializes midstory, delivering a beautiful, pocket-size performance as the mistress of one of the condemned men, does the film spring to life.

60
Village Voice
Jessica Winter
Boldly aspirational. It's Jeunet's stab at "Paths of Glory," dipped in a sepia bath and halfway wrenched into a women's picture.

60
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.

50
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.

50
Dallas Observer
Melissa Levine
The result is nothing but allusive and memorial. And boring. This film is boring, at least partly because it is trying desperately to be big.

50
Austin Chronicle
Kimberley Jones
The elements are all here for something spectacular and in brilliant bursts, Jeunet really gets it but in the end, all that potential is sunk by a terminally confused tone and milquetoast pairing of lovers. Pity that.


The average user rating for this movie is 8.0 (out of 10) based on 36 User Votes
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