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The Life Before Her Eyes
Metascore
38 out of 100

Generally unfavorable - based on 25 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 25
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 25
  3. Negative: 11 out of 25
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  1. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Mick LaSalle
    100
    Emotionally sophisticated, humane and worth talking about for hours.
  2. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    Of the two timelines, the one featuring the teenage Diana is more involving than the one featuring the adult version. Both lead actresses give fine performances, but Thurman has less material to work with.
  3. Charlotte Observer
    Reviewed by: Lawrence Toppman
    75
    The fact that I didn't understand a film, that its ending can be interpreted at least two ways and maybe three – all likely to be "true" – usually sends me growling in disgust from the theater. But The Life Before Her Eyes has grown on me in memory.
  4. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Carina Chocano
    70
    Though atmospheric and occasionally suspenseful, its gimmickry keeps it from being transcendent.
  5. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    70
    Uma Thurman delivers a mesmerizing performance in The Life Before Her Eyes, a film that, once seen and fully digested, exerts the same haunting pull as the shattering events it chronicles.
  6. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    63
    The best thing about The Life Before Her Eyes, a somber meditation on fate and friendship, is the way it captures the close relationship between two teenage girls.
  7. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Michael Rechtshaffen
    60
    Boasting two terrific performances by Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood as the adult and teenage versions of the same character.
  8. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Sid Smith
    50
    Beautiful, horrifying, exasperating and just plain weird.
  9. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    50
    It's sad to see such subtle, wrenchingly emotional work expended on such trifling material.
  10. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Bill White
    50
    The Life Before Her Eyes is like one of those puzzles. There is something wrong in each scene, and the viewer zeroes in on the elements that don't fit, wondering if there is a purpose behind them.
  11. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    42
    Director Vadim Perelman is big on slo-mo lyrical effects and confusing time shifts, making the movie unnecessarily arty and detracting from what could have been a searing psychological study.
  12. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    40
    Moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L'Oreal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather.
  13. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    40
    Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, The Life Before Her Eyes contradicts the director's claim in the production notes that the movie "is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects."
  14. Variety
    Reviewed by: John Anderson
    40
    A femme-centric drama about the aftermath of a high school massacre, profoundly confusing "In Bloom" arrives at some very tenuous moral conclusions that might alienate much of its supposed target audience.
  15. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Janice Page
    38
    When the big twist is revealed at the end of The Life Before Her Eyes, you might think the only way to appreciate its cleverness is to see the film again. I did that. It didn't help.
  16. Premiere
    Reviewed by: Glenn Kenny
    38
    While "House of Sand and Fog" remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.
  17. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    33
    Perelman pays such cooing attention to surfaces that our response to violence carries no more importance than our response to the delicate jewelry around the adult Diana's neck.
  18. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Tasha Robinson
    33
    Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.
  19. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    30
    Perelman eases the transitions between the past and the present with echoing phrases and situations, but they all seem rather pat and contrived. Does he really think that repeated refrains from the Zombies oldie, "She's Not There," won't be a dead (so to speak) giveaway?
  20. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    30
    Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama.
  21. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick
    25
    An overwrought and patently offensive anti- abortion drama from the director of the accomplished "House of Sand and Fog."
  22. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Marc Mohan
    25
    Confused, morally queasy, self-important mess.
  23. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
    20
    What this heavy-handed film mainly has to endure is a clunky story structure and an ending that wasn't original when it was seen four decades ago on "The Twilight Zone."
  24. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    20
    In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" and Vadim Perelman's The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke's film would win--but only because he's working so much harder to be noxious.
  25. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    20
    Consider this more a consumer warning than a movie review: The Life Before Her Eyes will draw you in, then intrigue you, then bore you, then bewilder you, then make you crazy with its incessant flashbacks and flash forwards, and finally leave you feeling like the victim of a fraud.
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User Reviews

All reviews »
User Score
7.0 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 17 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 5
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 5
  3. Negative: 1 out of 5
  1. Enrique
    4
    Barely convincing. Uma Thurmann is fine but the script is too contrived. A big disappointment.
  2. Richard.
    10
    The critics could not be more wrong. This is the most profound and emotional film of the year so far. It's sad that many people will not see it based on the copycat critics reviews.… Full Review »
  3. ChadS.
    8
    When the good girl met the bad girl in Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen", the bad girl exerted her will on the good girl, and the good girl became bad. The good girl was played by Evan Rachel Wood. This time, in "The Life Before Her Eyes", she's the bad girl, who meets a good girl, and she becomes a good girl, too. The good girl is played by Eva Amurri. Diana McFee(Uma Thurman) can thank Maureen for the woman she is today. But where is Maureen? The last time we saw her, she was in a high school girls' bathroom with her best friend and the gunman. Since "The Life Before Her Eyes" predicates itself as a sort of "Donnie Darko" for women, Maureen's fate isn't wholly determinisitic, because the past is present, the past is fluid, as Diana rewrites her history, her husband and child's history, and especially, Maureen's history from a contemporary epoch(the weeks leading up to the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre) that runs parallel to the past. Like Alejandro Agresti's "The Lake House", this "My So-Called Elephant" is sci-fi for women who don't like sci-fi.… Full Review »
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