Metacritic Film

Far Side of the Moon

Starring Robert Lepage, Anne-Marie Cadieux, Marco Poulin, Céline Bonnier, Gregory Hlady, Richard Fréchette, Lorraine Côté, Sophie Faucher, and Érika Gagnon

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

TLA Releasing
Drama  |  Foreign
105 minutes | Color
Canada
Released In Theaters December 2, 2005

Childhood memories and the race to the moon by two rival nations are recurring themes in this feature film exploring reconciliation and the fundamental question of whether we're alone in the universe. (TLA Releasing)

WRITTEN BY
Robert Lepage

DIRECTED BY
Robert Lepage

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

76 / 100

Critic Reviews

100 The Hollywood Reporter
An achingly eloquent rumination.
90 Village Voice Mark Peranson
Reworking his own raw material, Lepage spins a rich, moving film that acknowledges humanity's power to break out of Earth's daily gravity; in the process, he leaves audiences floating.
88 New York Daily News
Rarely do adaptations of stage plays work on screen, and almost never do they work as well as this one does. Most remarkably, the dryly comic "Moon" is virtually a one-man show.
80 The New York Times
Based on Mr. Lepage's play of the same title, Far Side of the Moon carries traces of the theater both in some of the dialogue and in its schematic construction. That said, it has been beautifully shot by the cinematographer Ronald Plante in the kind of high-definition digital video that makes the future of cinema look rather less grim than usual.
75 New York Post
A master class on turning a talky, one-man play into a visual delight.
70 Chicago Reader
This began as a one-man show, but Lepage has transferred it beautifully to the screen, where its cosmos of ideas hangs weightless.
63 Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
Like many stage-to-screen projects "Moon" loses something in the journey from the planet Theater to the planet High-Def Video. Yet Lepage is such an interesting camera subject, you stick with this dreamy rumination even when the going gets arch.
63 TV Guide
Lepage maintains a leisurely pace and lets the narrative wander, but ultimately lands on the right side of the line between contemplative noodling and aimless navel-gazing, ending with an image that's simultaneously melancholy and playful.
50 San Francisco Chronicle
Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

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