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67Confused? So is Miral, a film that makes bits and pieces of the Palestinian experience come alive without assembling them into a coherent vision.
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63Miral feels like gastric bypass moviemaking. It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis.
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63Bogged down by speechifying and a plodding pace, Miral is well-intentioned but doesn't achieve the searing emotional resonance suggested by the story.
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60Any film as politically specific as Miral needs to be addressed on two levels, as a movie and as, from a certain viewpoint, a polemic. If a viewer can separate one from the other - and some may not - there's an intense, novelistic drama here.
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Mar 24, 201160The lack of a compelling lead figure, combined with Schnabel's tentative approach to the material, casts the film's later stretches in the balmy glow of soap opera.
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60Schnabel doesn't comes close to the quiet power of his last feature, "The Diving Bell And The Butterfly," delivering a story that can't match the scope or scale of Rula Jebreal's source material.
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50The few Jewish characters are cartoonishly evil, but even the Palestinians are sketchily dramatized or, in the case of a terrorist, clumsily legitimized.
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50This story of a girl growing up in the occupied territories never finds its footing.
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Mar 27, 201150Schnabel and his collaborators get points for taking on a crucial and underrepresented viewpoint. If only the result were more compelling.
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50Miral stumbles, both thematically and stylistically. The two things that undermine the director's balance? Peace and love.
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50It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality.
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50To say that Mr. Schnabel's film is innocuous is not to say that it's any good. Like so many other well-intentioned movies about politically contentious issues, it is hobbled by its own sincerity and undone by a confused aesthetic agenda.
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Mar 21, 201150Dramatically but unevenly explores the lives of four Palestinian women during the years of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
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50Schnabel's signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga.
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40So much of Abbas' dialogue consists of stiff platitudes (the script is by journalist Rula Jebreal, based on her novel of the same name); the character she's playing has been reduced to a dull, saintly figure, and not even Abbas can find a way out of that miniature prison.
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40A perfectly boring movie from Julian Schnabel - is it possible?
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40Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style.
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25Rendered nearly unwatchable by overblown close-ups and an unrelenting shaky-cam.
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25Combining narrative heavy-handedness with an airy disdain for the details of the situation, director Julian Schnabel gives us a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Miral.
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9This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
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