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100The eerie tale is steeped in brooding atmosphere and psychological suspense thanks to Glazer's hugely imaginative visual style and creative use of music, sound, and silence.
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88An effective thriller precisely because it is true to the way sophisticated people might behave in this situation. Its characters are not movie creatures, gullible, emotional and quickly moved to tears. They're realists, rich, a little jaded.
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88There are moments so beautifully composed and so resonant in Jonathan Glazer's (Sexy Beast) sophomore effort, I can at least propose it's a "near-great."
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80What the intelligently spooky Birth does best is disturb us.
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80Without Ms. Kidman's brilliantly nuanced performance, Birth might feel arch, chilly and a little sadistic, but she gives herself so completely to the role that the film becomes both spellbinding and heartbreaking, a delicate chamber piece with the large, troubled heart of an opera.
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80While it veers heavily toward pretentiousness, this striking metaphysical mystery is intensely compelling, conjuring a mood between European high-arthouse and the unsettling psychological horror of "Rosemary's Baby."
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75The best of what's onscreen is a mesmerizing mind-teaser.
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75Birth makes its oddball supernaturalism seem completely, compellingly real.
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75Birth presents an intriguing premise about death and the possibility of rebirth in an elegant, melancholy and deliberate fashion.
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70A fine cast, understated treatment and tantalizing premise make for a movie well worth seeing even if you don't come away believing.
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63The dialogue is sparse but well used -- it's refreshing to see a movie where people don't feel compelled to talk all the time.
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63It's corny, plodding, implausible and - on occasion - seriously creepy. At the same time, it contains a couple of this movie year's most sublime sequences, and features one of Nicole Kidman's bravest and best performances.
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60Terrific acting and fearless direction transform what might have been a silly exercise in the slightly spooky into a somber and deeply romantic mystery.
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60Imagine if Stanley Kubrick had made Ghost and you're some way to this classily restrained oddity, but its morbid preoccupations and ambiguity might prove too cuckoo for most.
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60If Birth succeeds more as a source of visual and aural enthrallment than as supernatural narrative, it's largely because the final third hovers uncomfortably between the mystical and the earthbound.
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60Ridiculous, and oddly unforgettable.
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60This movie, taken all together, is one of the most bizarre combinations of distinguished talent and inane ideas that I've ever seen.
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58Kidman's performance is the best thing in the movie, but it's not at all appealing.
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For awhile, the stately symphonic score, urbane setting and understated dress make Birth feel powerful--until it feels empty, lacking what Glazer so furiously exhibited in his equally stylized freshman endeavor: heart.
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50Kidman gives an other stunning performance in Birth, but it is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that ultimately reveals . . . not much.
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50Begins like a penetrating exploration of love, grief and suffering and ends looking like a highbrow version of "Bride of Chucky."
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50Despite its trappings, despite its style, Birth is just a tall tale with a short reach.
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50It's a spooky movie without anything really scary in it, a ghost story without any spirits, a romance that displays scant affection, a reincarnation tale that never uses that particular word nor engages in anything terribly transcendental.
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50A little like the '80s crowd-pleaser "Ghost," but way artier.
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50In this eerily tranquil psychological thriller, Nicole Kidman's placid countenance is like a Rorschach: you'll project onto it what you want to see.
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42When Kidman slithers into a bathtub with her young ''husband,'' the scene, in its soft-pedaled way, is the definition of exploitation: It appears to have been cooked up for no other purpose than to conjure creepy child-porn overtones.
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40The ick-factor deepens as the story progresses, but the mystery never does.
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38Such a meticulously wrought piece of hokum that it's both easy to admire and impossible to warm up to.
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38Stay away from Birth not because of what goes on (or doesn't) in a bathtub, but because this is not a very good movie.
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33Handsomely photographed, artfully edited and acted with skill and conviction. It is also so stupid that you expect to see strings of drool dripping from the corner of the screen.
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A paranormal mystery without a spine. It has no suspense because it has no belief in itself.
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30Birth may be the most futile application of cinematic and acting skill I've seen all year. A little "Twilight Zone" flummery would have livened up the proceedings to no end.
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30You're almost tempted to laugh at Birth by the end, but by then you're too busy cursing it to bother.
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For all its art-house posturing, for all its exploration of the taboo topic, Birth is anything but good.
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25Birth, which should never have been conceived, is obscure in every way: visually, philosophically and psychologically.
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20Might have qualified as dumb fun if they hadn't left out the fun.
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20Too highbrow for the multiplex and too literal for the hipsters, it's unsatisfying both as gothic camp and serious cinema.
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20Birth is one of those films occasionally encountered that make me question my nativity or that of the film-makers. Were they and I born on the same planet? If so, how could we now have such vastly different criteria of a film story's believability?
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 19 out of 38
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Mixed: 5 out of 38
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Negative: 14 out of 38
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MaxB.10
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