- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
90A wholly enveloping experience. Gentle, ravishingly beautiful and awash in everyday sensuality, it so intoxicates you with the elegance and refinement of its filmmaking that even noticing, let alone caring, whether it has a plot starts to seem beside the point.
-
90Vertical Ray slows our rhythms and heightens our senses: it's a shimmering, tactile experience.
-
88It's a simple story with complex reverberations and undercurrents, as secrets keep being revealed.
-
83Underneath the ravishing imagery however, hearts are in flux.
-
80There are scenes that simply ask the audience to drink in the details, to enjoy the repast, just as much as follow the plot.
-
80It's a bewildering but deeply satisfying paradox, this constant, nearly silent collision in Tran's films of the visible world and the turbulent, unseen world.
-
78The magnificence of the film's pieces does not quite add up to a satisfying whole.
-
75Beautiful, languorous, passive -- it plays like background music for itself.
-
75The cinematography is gorgeous from first frame to last, but the story occasionally rings false.
-
75Plays like a holy, erotic mood piece, steeped in so much subdued jungle fever that it practically runs on photosynthesis.
-
75Few filmmakers of the past 20 years have mesmerized as much in their use of crisp, color-drenched photography.
-
75Made of a serene dynamite that's all but unknown to American film audiences.
-
Tran's cinematography is delicate yet probing. Faces, especially eyes, tell much of the story.
-
75Much of the film is oddly ambiguous, as if Tran used it to explore conflicts of tradition and modernity and never came up with any answers.
-
70An oblique, vaguely sorrowful study in domestic emotion, structured around the small eruptions of feeling -- tenderness, anger, and joy -- that punctuate the slow serenity of daily life.
-
63Here's the downside, and it's not just me: You need a scorecard to keep track of the sisters, their brother, two husbands, a boyfriend, two (or three?) extramarital lovers.
-
63For all its virtues, this is not a film to see on less than a good night's sleep.
-
60If you're looking for refuge from summer movie bombast, it's frequently intoxicating.
-
60This sleepyheaded atmosphere, augmented by the languid songs of Lou Reed and Arab Strap, hangs so heavily over the film that the viewer is lulled into a state dangerously close to unconsciousness.
-
60Filled with bird sounds, Vertical Ray is almost surreal in its paradise imagery -- the movie is a sultry, harmoniously expressionistic riot of pale greens and deep yellows.
-
50Story is fairly conventional and not especially well told, though as usual Tran's images are so sensual and beautiful that I was rarely bored or frustrated.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 7 out of 7
-
Mixed: 0 out of 7
-
Negative: 0 out of 7
-
MildaM10Marvelous!!!!