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75The movie's success rests largely on the shoulders of Fernanda Montenegro, an actress who successfully defeats any temptation to allow sentimentality to wreck her relationship with the child.
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75A touching, well-made motion picture whose only real flaw lies in the overfamiliar storyline.
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91A richly tender and moving experience.
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75The performances are engaging and the views of rural Brazil are captivating, making the film a solid audience-pleaser even though its story often seems familiar and sentimental.
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80Filled with moments of real poignancy and gentle epiphanies, the film is also marked by strong Christian undercurrents, but, like everything else in Salles's film, they're handled with extraordinary delicacy and never feel exclusionary.
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60This 1998 film held my interest for two hours, even taking on an epic feel when it turns into a road movie. It's not bad by any means, but it also happens to resemble a lot of other movies.
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90For Fernanda Montenegro, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Italy's late Giulietta Masina (Federico Fellini's wife and frequent star) in appearance and talent, "Central Station" is a personal triumph and a rich cinematic experience.
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78The story is much less about its resolution than the experience along the way. At its best, Central Station is a movie of small textures and fleeting moments, the intangibles that pass between people.
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100Easily among the top 10 films made last year.
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80Montenegro carries the film su-perbly with her portrait of gritty strength being worn down to a state of tattered vulnerability, while newcomer de Oliveira, a shoeshine boy who won the role over 1,500 other aspirants, is engagingly natural and happily doesn't beg for viewer sympathy.
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100Normally the sound in movie theaters is of popcorn crunching. But the sound at theaters where Central Station is showing is of hearts breaking.
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80A touching and unusual road movie-cum-buddy film.
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90An intimate epic.
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90Profoundly affecting.
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90[Salles]'s imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting.
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70In this otherwise rather schematic swatch of social catharsis, Brazil's Fernanda Montenegro gives the best performance by an actress I've seen all year.
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100Fernanda Montenegro gives a landmark performance.
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80There's plenty of room for sentimentality here, but the wonder of Salles' film is all in the telling.
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70I wasn't in the mood for this film, but it got to me anyway.
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40It's blatantly manipulative pairing of an adorable young boy and a selfish, honesty-challenged older woman [is] so calculating that I could never get emotionally involved.
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88Salles' solid narrative is only deceptively simple; there is a lot of dimension and depth to this gentle, sometimes painful portrait of two wanderers.
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90But in a calculated move that pays off handsomely, the picture's remarkable power is reserved for the end, when the intertwining themes coalesce in an extraordinarily satisfying and stirring way.
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While the cinematography is gorgeous and the script extremely sharp, Central Station owes much of its strength to its two mismatched leads.
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A mildly saccharine but kind-hearted movie.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 10
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Mixed: 0 out of 10
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Negative: 1 out of 10
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10
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DougS.1This a terribly amateurish boring movie that I would not wish on anyone. Don't waste your time, get something else.
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JimG.7Enjoyable portrait of the universal search for family.