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100It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.
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100Sicilian-born filmmaker Emanuele Crialese takes a huge leap forward from his pretty but simplistic "Respiro" with this highly original, startlingly beautiful and emotionally resonant film.
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100The familiar majesty of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline is replaced with anticipation and imagination. The sense of hope and wonder is the greater for it, and the sense of promise glows from the screen.
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88Called "Nuovomondo" in its native Italy, it's bittersweet, neither as comic and sentimental as Charlie Chaplin's 1917 great silent comedy "The Immigrant," nor as cynical and epic as Elia Kazan's 1963 "America, America," but close to both.
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88Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there.
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88The Golden Door feels, at points, like a silent film - a silent film with CinemaScope vistas and dazzling, saturated color.
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80The greatness of Golden Door is its tone; sympathetic but always wry.
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With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnés Godard confirms her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today.
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80Beautiful, spacey, trans-oceanic odyssey.
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80What makes Mr. Crialese's telling unusual, apart from the gorgeousness of his wide-screen compositions, is that his emphasis is on departure and transition, rather than arrival.
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80An imaginative, intelligent and attractive Italo pic precisely when the country needs it most, Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door reps a solid piece of cinema that neither panders nor preaches.
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80After countless films in which immigration plays a central role -- one of the earliest was Charlie Chaplin's 1917 silent classic "The Immigrant" while one of the best, Jan Troell's "The Emigrants," has never migrated to DVD -- you'd think the canon was essentially complete. Yet this visionary work adds to it by combining harsh realities with magic-realist fantasies.
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80Writ small, Golden Door is an absorbing and moving love story; writ large, it's the story we've never stopped telling ourselves.
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80Italian writer-director Emanuele Crialese is best known for the art-house piffle "Respiro" (2002), a sun-kissed fairy tale that didn't prepare me for the weight and solidity of this historical drama about a Sicilian peasant family immigrating to the U.S.
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75The acting is superb, especially the always alluring Charlotte Gainsbourg as a mysterious Englishwoman taking the ship to America. Agnes Godard's lensing is painterly, and Crialese's direction is seamless.
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75Historians at Ellis Island estimate nearly half of all Americans had at least one ancestor pass through there between 1892 and 1954.
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67Journey is weary, yet imaginative.
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63As lovely to look at as it is dramatically inert.
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58Draggy Italian epic that's big on production values but skimpy on inspiration.
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50The movie never really comes alive, and Crialese's coyness with Lucy's character is more frustrating than mysterious.
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50Despite the hardships depicted, Golden Door is a sweet film at heart, playing witness to the birth pangs of modern America with both due respect and the occasional comic grace note, but not, oddly, one single shot of the Statue of Liberty.
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A sluggish procedural on what it was like to make the journey to Ellis Island back in the day.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 3
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Mixed: 1 out of 3
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Negative: 0 out of 3
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EzekielB9
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JimG7Some wonderful moments in this film visually and emotionally, but unfortunately uneven. Way better than most films however.
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KennethB.450 minutes shorter and maybe there is a movie here! It just dragged on. The art direction and cinematography was excellent.