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90That rare beast, a terrific movie that boasts intelligent wit, expert storytelling, delightful characters and grown-up dialogue plus suspense and a wicked surprise ending.
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88For a film that points out so much wrong with German society and shows such dubious, dangerous behavior, it leaves the audience with high spirits and a sense of crazy exhilaration.
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83A fluid and gripping drama from Germany (it has the design of a thriller and the mood of a spontaneous, whirling-camera character study).
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80Unpredictable and hugely entertaining.
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80An engaging entertainment that packages its thought-provoking ideas in a combination of political thriller, comic adventure and romantic triangle.
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80A sweet, funny and gripping romantic adventure, it's about the limitations of political activism in this day and age, and what happens when your girlfriend and your best friend fall in love.
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80A slyly effective thriller and of a deft comedy of romantic confusion. Whatever its shortcomings as a consideration of globalization and its discontents, The Edukators succeeds brilliantly in telling the story of a man who falls in love with his best buddy's girlfriend and doesn't know what to do about it.
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80Uncommonly smart and interesting.
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80A deft, entertaining story that mixes menace with charm and satire with seriousness.
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80What makes the film so affecting, however, is its matter-of-fact evocation of character. Each person in the four-character cast is vivid and specific and believable.
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78Sticking it to the man, German-style.
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75You can sympathize with both sides in their ideological battle, which ends in a most unexpected way.
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75It's an action movie that's also an intellectual-action flick.
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75There's an evenhanded humanism flowing through The Edukators that may strike doctrinaire viewers on either side of the divide as mushy, but it's tough enough for the rest of us to chew on for a long time.
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75If you can look beyond the simple-minded Socratic political discourse, The Edukators reveals itself as warm, humane and sad, a movie that genuinely wants you to think about how idealism eventually collides with human frailty, and about what upstarts and sell-outs might teach one another.
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75It's a rare film that gets smarter as it goes along, injecting a satisfying dash of pragmatism every time it seems ready to slip into either unearned idealism or cynical fatalism.
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70Unlike in, say, "Fight Club," director Hans Weingartner does not hedge his bets on the notion of whether simple-minded anarchy is any better than societal conformity -- his heart is with the Edukators, period.
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70There is certainly a trill of suspense to be had from these ideological heists, but Weingartner's movie is never quite as keen-edged as it hopes or needs to be.
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70Though the story drags for the first hour, this becomes a solid character study once the principals arrive at their hiding place.
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63Unless you're the sort who has a Che Guevara T-shirt tucked away somewhere in your closet, the needlessly long The Edukators wears out its welcome.
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63The dialogue between the captive and the captors gets a little didactic, and the ending is as contrived as it is cynical. Weingartner obviously has more in common with the rich man than the kids.
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63Perhaps the harshest criticism of the new German film The Edukators is that it doesn't make you feel any better edukated.
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60Ambling drama shows an exasperating lack of economy and a weakness for diatribe dialogue, but becomes progressively more involving after a laborious start.
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50It could have been something substantial.
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50Put simply, this second feature by the young Austrian director Hans Weingartner is a put-on -- a glib anti-capitalist rant in which the rhetoric rarely rises above the you-too-can-save-a-child-for-less-than-the-price-of-coffee level.
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50The film's daring, honest ending helps redeem the uneven drama, but the road there may occasionally try the patience of even the most sympathetic armchair revolutionaries.
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50The Edukators smiles indulgently as the kids rage belatedly against the dying of the SDS light.
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20The film begs for more action, thrills, and jokes, or more dramatic and painful revelations. What we get is an in-between mash of romantic ideals, a botched kidnapping, and some very good time wasted.
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PhilS.9Simply great.