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75This is a movie of substance and thrilling historical sweep, and its three hours allow Szabo to show the family's destiny forming and shifting under pressure.
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100From the outside, Sunshine sounds like the most boring film on Earth. In fact, it's glorious.
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75The filmmaking is uninspired and Fiennes inexplicably plays three different characters with exactly the same acting style.
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83While inevitably oversimplified, is never less than engrossing.
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70That this handsome, three-hour extravaganza coheres at all is a small miracle; that it actually leaves you wanting more is a major one.
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100A powerful film.
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70It is a superb period re-creation and boasts a formidable international cast.... It is nevertheless absorbing and illuminating in regard to the eras its spans but is also pretty wearying by the time it starts winding down.
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63The saga might have worked better as a novel, where we could cast the characters with our imaginations, and keep them straight.
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75The sunshine in Sunshine comes from women around him (Fiennes).
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50Ultimately one of those sprawling epics best suited for a rainy day.
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91So filled with riches that it seems a bit unfair to single out Szabo and Fiennes, no matter how outstanding their work.
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88An incredibly ambitious film and one of the most highly accomplished of the year.
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75This movie doesn't make you think you are watching art. It's closer to a high-end TV movie with lots of familiar faces.
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90It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.
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80Leaves you with a sense of quiet, chastened grace.
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75It is often as powerful as it is elegantly shot. Unfortunately, Szabo tends to tell this rather predictable tale in an obvious yet uneven way.
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70Many of the plot points seem belabored because they're introduced in the voice-over, then ploddingly dramatized, then analyzed by the family over meals.
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70Sunshine is a trifle schematic. But it also makes you feel, quite poignantly, the crushing tides of history: heedless, inhuman--and tragic.
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52Eventually succumbs to fatal overlength.
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63Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.
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70Despite Sunshine's historical scope and multiplicity of characters, it doesn't shed half as much light on its subject -- identity and anti-Semitism -- as does, for example, Agnieszka Holland's claustrophobic chamber piece "Angry Harvest."
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80What makes Sunshine unique, what rewards a first viewing and lives in the mind long thereafter, is that Szabo has attempted to place Judaism and Christianity on a continuum that is both historically truthful and highly personal.
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30That this mess should come from the hand of Istvan Szabo, the brilliant Hungarian director of "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is the real shocker.
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50Sunshine's historical reference-heavy narrative walks a fine line between novelistic tragedy and comically overstated melodrama, falling down on the job more than once.
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75For filmgoers not interested in history, Sunshine might be a three-hour investment they may not want to undertake.
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60Well-intentioned but never entirely engaging chronicle.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 7
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Mixed: 0 out of 7
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Negative: 0 out of 7
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Lizd8
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MaybeJustNotHungarianEnough8
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ElliottH.10