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100Viveka Seldahl and Sven Wollter will touch you to the core in a film you will never forget -- that you should never forget.
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From its invitingly upbeat overture to its pathos-filled but ultimately life-affirming finale, "Martin" is a masterfully conducted work.
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88Starts at the beginning and goes straight through to the inevitable end, unblinkingly. It doesn't relieve the pressure, as "Iris" does, with flashbacks to happier days.
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80Scenes from a marriage unfolding at the limits of love and personality.
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80A moving love story with two exquisite central performances.
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80August, who also made "Pelle the Conqueror" and "House of the Spirits," steers this story to its stirring conclusion with firm lack of sentimentality.
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75Doesn't sugarcoat the painful realities of Alzheimer's or the difficult decisions faced by relatives of its victims, but by film's end, its clear-eyed melancholy winds up feeling strangely uplifting.
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75Sven Wollter and Viveka Seldahl give superb performances as the couple, a once-vigorous conductor and his orchestra's concertmistress. But soon ... well, you know the drill.
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70A touching examination of the ravages of Alzheimer's disease, made even more so by the extraordinary chemistry between Swedish actor Sven Wollter and his real-life wife, Viveka Seldahl, who died shortly after the film was completed.
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70August so firmly establishes characters of Martin and Barbara and their relationship, so when the disease does enter the picture, the film does not suddenly become about that; the focus clearly remains on the effect it takes on the people.
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70Watching it, I kept imagining the depth of feeling Ingmar Bergman and his troupe might have brought to the same material. As much as A Song for Martin hurts, it doesn't quite go the distance.
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67The movie, for all its sincerity, becomes clinical and repetitious, though its unsparing vision of the fragility of identity can give you a shudder.
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60Only August's assured direction and the leads' solid performances elevate this above a TV "disease of the week" movie.
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50This slow-moving Swedish film offers not even a hint of joy, preferring to focus on the humiliation of Martin as he defecates in bed and urinates on the plants at his own birthday party.
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50Starts in one direction, then performs a cruel narrative fake-out, sandwiching together two different movies that are scarcely related.