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100It is one of those rare movies that is not just about a story, or some characters, but about a whole universe of feeling.
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100In Jan Campion's The Piano, the emotions are deep, fierce, primordial. Sexuality overwhelms the film's characters like ocean waves blasting against a cliffside. [19 Nov 1993]
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100Magical and haunting, The Piano has the power and delicate mystery of a gothic fairy tale. [19 Nov 1993]
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100Campion's script is very well received, but the film finally makes it on cinematics: bleakly beautiful photography, haunting score, and good acting. [12 Nov 1993]
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100Great art is both immediately accessible and eternally elusive, having at its centre a powerful simplicity that speaks to anyone who cares to listen, that rewards every interpretation while embracing none. The Piano is great art.
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100By the end, Campion views all her characters with a compassion bordering on grace, a humanity-like her heroine's-as dark, quiet, and enveloping as the ocean.
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100Prepare yourself for something very special...Here's a severely beautiful, mysterious movie that, as if by magic, liberates the romantic imagination. [16 Oct 1993]
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100With its breathtaking visual style and careful attention to sound and movement, the movie provokes contemplation about the ways people communicate – through words, through music, through sex, and, most significantly, through touch. [14 Dec 1993, p.A14(E)]
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100The Piano plays itself with such contrapuntal richness, it resonates in you forever.
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100The Piano is dark, sublime music, and after it's over, you won't be able to get it out of your head.
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100The story worms further into the guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly modern: its surrealism. [29 Nov 1993, p.148]
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90It takes exceptional acting to enable a story like this to take hold, and Campion has gotten it here. [19 Nov 1993]
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90Campion has spun a fable as potently romantic as a Bronte tale. But The Piano is also deeply cinematic. [22 Nov 1993]
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90The Piano confirms Campion as a major talent, an uncompromising filmmaker with a very personal and specific vision.
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89The wonder of The Piano is that such an outwardly simple story could emerge into such a complex swirl of lingering memories.
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80Campion's eye is extraordinary. She searches out the detail that makes the image, and the image that tells the story more eloquently than words ever could.
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80"Sweetie" and "An Angel at My Table" have taught us to expect startling as well as beautiful things from Jane Campion, and this assured and provocative third feature offers yet another lush parable--albeit a bit more calculated and commercially minded--about the perils and paradoxes of female self-expression.
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75Although the action tends to become melodramatic and even overwrought at times, the imaginative power of Campion's images and emotional insights (especially with regard to the heroin) rarely allow the story to seem artificial or exaggerated. [12 Nov 1993]
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75A solid motion picture with a universal message and occasional splashes of genius, but it is remarkable only as Holly Hunter's performance is concerned.
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10An overwrought, hollowly symbolic glob of glutinous nonsense... I haven't seen a sillier film about a woman and a piano since John Huston's "The Unforgiven" (1960), a Western in which Lillian Gish had her piano carried out into the front yard so she could play Mozart to pacify attacking Indians. [13 Dec 1993]
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 21 out of 30
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Mixed: 2 out of 30
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Negative: 7 out of 30
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