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88Feels like an old-fashioned movie in the way it deals with bold sacrifices made in the name of love, while its setting and chary view of the era's political machinations mark it as distinctly modern.
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88The movie that deserved to win the Oscar for foreign-language film, and one of the best movies ever made about life behind the Iron Curtain.
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88A grand, old-fashioned movie of spies and Communist repression.
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88Picks up steam from the ominous opening scene and ends as a quietly suspenseful thriller.
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83Has the sensibility of a Hollywood "woman's picture" of the '40s -- the weepie saga of a married woman trapped in an untenable situation.
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80Takes the most somber of predicaments, and makes it involving, romantic and ultimately intensely suspenseful.
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80Wargnier's sumptuous, moving new film, captures both the hope of the returning Russians and their brutal betrayal.
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75Has great themes and great actors.
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75One of the unique virtues of the cinema is its ability to bring history to life with engrossing detail and gripping immediacy; East-West does this.
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75With its fiery tone and fierce intensity, East-West offers a profile of a country suspended in fear as well as of one woman's indomitable passion for freedom.
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70It's Deneuve, in little more than a cameo, who commands your attention and doesn't release you until she's good and ready.
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70This complex, heartbreaking film recounts the brutal struggle of one couple to survive.
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70The two-hour film never feels a minute too long.
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63The movie as a whole lacks the conviction of a real story. It is more like a lush morality play, too leisurely in its storytelling, too sure of its morality.
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63Isn't always easy to sit through, but it repays patience. It's an honorable film, and it earns its undertow of poignancy derived from.
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60Packed with melodrama, and often it works in the passionate, easy-to-watch manner of an old-fashioned "woman's film."
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60Wargnier has assembled a stellar French and Russian cast, but all that talent can't overcome his heavy-handed screenplay.
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60Too often caught between trying to be a sweeping period drama and intimate love story at the same time, with a script that's never fully satisfying on either count.
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58Wargnier directs his French historical drama, a foreign film Oscar nominee, in a way that allows little perspective on the extent of Stalinist cruelty; even when terrible things happen, they do so sedately.
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50Wargnier chooses a sweeping title and a sweeping topic, then turns everything into half-baked melodrama, heavy on over-the-top emotion but light on subtlety and ideas.
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50It is well-made in an old-fashioned way, and its straight-arrow lack of cynicism may be old- fashioned as well.
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50Although it's interesting and well-performed, East-West never locates its crux: It's all over the map.
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50By the time the movie ends, having traversed numerous plot twists and character revelations, the viewer is emotionally drained in a bittersweet sort of way.
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40Director Regis Warginer ("Indochine") lets his film degenerate into a turgid melodrama.
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40The film looks great, but Wargnier is so heavy-handed in his portrayal of postwar Russia that it casts suspicions on the film's reliability as history.
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40Wargnier is also a lousy storyteller who seems not to understand how to shape a narrative.
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40Stodgy storytelling and a hyperbolic score reduce their experiences to melodrama.
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