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100At its best, A Home at the End of the World has great emotional strength. But it's not the towering achievement it might have been if Cunningham had stayed truer to his original inspiration.
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100Charged by a passion for life, A Home at the End of the World is a major achievement.
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88Colin Farrell is astonishing in the movie.
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80Driven by soulful performances and by a genuine sense of wonder for the unpredictable permutations of love and family.
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75How many movies these days leave you wanting more? The funny and heartfelt Home is a small treasure.
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75The movie is really a lovely ensemble piece. Beautifully conceived and written by Michael Cunningham (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours), the film has a distinctly novelistic and literate style.
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75Bobby marks a turning point for Colin Farrell, whose vulgarities and inelegance tend to get the better of his range.
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75Home is a difficult film for its viewer, because none of the leads fall into the comfortable categories of film characters played by movie stars.
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75There's something essential and emotional missing in this character-driven piece. It's more an admirably performed and observed study -- of a time, place and three very different people -- than it is the heartbreaking and engrossing story it could have been.
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70Cunningham's 1990 novel makes an assured, if not entirely satisfying, transition to the big screen in this terrifically acted exploration of the bonds that transcend traditional notions of family.
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70Cunningham's depth of feeling transformed the book's premise into something beyond sniggers or camp, and the best moments in the movie, which was directed by theater veteran Michael Mayer in his film debut and adapted by Cunningham, have a similar emotional charge.
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70Packs an irresistible emotional punch.
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70Watching Spacek dance around the bedroom, slowly loosening up while Laura Nyro plays, is one of the joys of this cinematic season.
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67Three actors play Bobby at different ages, and none of them quite jibe with the other – 16-year-old Bobby seems far savvier than the twenty-something version (who is played by a defanged Colin Farrell).
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63Farrell has the toughest role, playing a man who doesn't understand the powerful crosscurrents of his own emotions, the love, guilt and loyalty that become opposing forces and begin to destroy the relationships he covets.
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63The beautiful Wright Penn has a harder time anchoring the free-spirited Clare in territory that feels honest and true - there's a stagey quality to the actress' performance that goes beyond the stagey quality of her character.
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63The actors here are uniformly excellent, and the story has a definite lightweight charm.
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60At the movie's end, nuance is all we have left; beyond the admirable efforts of some of the actors, the picture leaves behind nothing so human as a fingerprint.
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60The film's first half is easily the best and brightest. As the movie moves into the more saddening sections, however, it loses most of its power.
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60The cast is good and the story affecting, though at times Michael Mayer's direction makes the production seem a little choked up over its own enlightenment. Sissy Spacek is memorable in a secondary role.
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58Most of the movie feels like Farrell's performance: deeply sincere, and more showy than convincing.
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The novel's interesting character of Alice, Jonathan's mother, is so cut and drained of complexity that it becomes a polite, blank waste of Sissy Spacek's talent.
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50The themes of A Home at the End of the World are all of the greeting-card variety -- home is where the heart is, family is what we make it, etc. -- and while they've been presented with great warmth and sincerity, they still come off as more than a little banal.
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50The picture is also the story of one character in particular, Bobby, and when it comes to Bobby, A Home at the End of the World is sappy and bogus.
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50Farrell looks so stymied we feel for the guy -- and when the door closes on A Home at the End of the World, that's the only feeling in town.
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50A perfect example of how a top-flight cast can compensate for unimaginative filmmaking.
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50The end result is a slow (occasionally glacially) paced movie that relies more on soulful facial expressions than dialogue that honestly represents what the characters are feeling.
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The film equivalent of the blind date described as "really nice." It's neither bad nor good, just sort of earnest and well-meaning.
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50I can't think of another contemporary novel -- unless it be Cunningham's far more ambitious and less successful "The Hours" -- less suited for the journey to film under any direction but that of, say, Russian dreamer Alexander Sokurov.
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50The result: some intriguing moments, even more intriguing performances, and a film that doesn't quite work.
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50There are times when one suspects that this film potentially could be the raunchiest sitcom pilot ever.
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50In parceling his story into discrete scenes, Mr. Cunningham has turned a delicate novel into a bland and clumsy film. A Home at the End of the World, is so thoroughly decent in its intentions and so tactful in its methods that people are likely to persuade themselves that it's better than it is, which is not very good.
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Cunningham's Cliff's Notes adaptation shrinks the character to a monosyllabic man-child with a puppy-dog stare.
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38Well-meaning yawn-fest.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 13
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Mixed: 2 out of 13
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Negative: 3 out of 13
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