| 90 |
The New York Times
Here the clinical, stopwatch precision of Mr. Tykwer's explorations of synchronicity and Kieslowski's warmer, metaphysically dreamy speculations about the role of chance and coincidence in human affairs synchronize into a film whose formal elegance is matched by its depth of feeling.
|
| 90 |
Chicago Reader
It's Tykwer's most assured picture to date, and like much of Kieslowski's best work it qualifies simultaneously as engrossing narrative and philosophical parable.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
Unusual, unexpected and strangely refreshing. For this movie to have resorted to a familiar action-flick finish with everything explained, pressed and dry-cleaned would have rendered it banal.
|
| 90 |
Wall Street Journal
Mr. Tykwer's hands the movie changes almost magically from drama to chase to romance. As it does so its moral weight lessens; by the end there is less than what first engaged the mind. What meets the eye, though, is unforgettable.
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| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
The result is both engrossing and moving, a poem about a love that breaks barriers and passes understanding.
|
| 88 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Odd, and awkward in places, but its lyricism and power stay with you.
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| 83 |
Portland Oregonian
Not just love, but maybe an escape from a wretched world. We're not sure, but that's what makes Heaven so inexplicably, intriguingly soulful, even in its most remote and architectural instances.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
Tykwer's actors seem completely clued in to his intentions. Both Blanchett and Ribisi give performances so restrained they're almost subliminal.
|
| 75 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
The result is a beautifully designed, lyrical fable of a movie, full of God's-eye shots from on high, placing the characters against the Italian scenery and medieval architecture.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Tykwer doesn't aim for the heights of excitement and invention he reached in "Run Lola Run," but he blends an impressively varied palette of moods into an intriguingly unpredictable story that's never short of ideas.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Poetic in its sadness, and Blanchett's performance confirms her power once again.
|
| 75 |
Boston Globe
It's maddeningly chowderheaded, simplistic, pretentious, and not a little silly. You can't take your eyes off it.
|
| 75 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Touching, transcendent love story.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
A mystical tale of two souls, joined in love but divided in society, seeking redemption and understanding before they pass to another plane.
|
| 75 |
Charlotte Observer
Blanchett is riveting.
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
If Heaven doesn't quite achieve the transcendent power that Kieslowski might have attained, it comes close. One shot in particular, with the couple making love under a tree in silhouette, is a thing of quiet, sublime beauty that is eloquent in a way words never could be.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
Too bad Heaven creeps into town when it deserved more fanfare. Consider it buried treasure, a thriller for the art- house crowd.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
An art film without the NYFF imprimatur, Heaven is a peculiar amalgam -- a Miramax package (without the hype), directed by German hotshot Tom Tykwer under the eye of Anthony Minghella, from a script with which the late Krzysztof Kieslowski had planned to inaugurate a new trilogy named for the Divine Comedy.
|
| 70 |
LA Weekly
Grahm Robinson
The final product is so eccentric and resolutely uncommercial -- and so faithful to the spirit of Kieslowski's oeuvre -- that it's hard to doubt the purity of Tykwer's intentions.
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
Heaven is so determined to be poetic and beautiful, it comes across as forced and didactic, a lesson in relative morality whose storyline doesn't so much flow as lurch from one stretch to another.
|
| 63 |
ReelViews
Heaven's tone is all wrong. The movie tries to be ethereal, but ends up seeming goofy.
|
| 60 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
With Heaven, Tykwer completes his self-appointment as Kieslowski's heir apparent, but since he has always been a better filmmaker than a thinker, his ideas drift into the ether.
|
| 60 |
Variety
Sports a lustrous performance by Cate Blanchett that gives the movie much of its final sheen but still can't keep it on the rails as the already flimsy story starts to disintegrate in the final act.
|
| 60 |
New York Magazine
A great deal of energy is expended on metaphysical ruminations that become ever fuzzier. The film is intended as an allegory, but it works best as a jailbreak romance. In this movie, lowbrow trumps highbrow every time.
|
| 50 |
Dallas Observer
Isn't a bad movie by conventional standards, just a boring one.
|
| 50 |
USA Today
Heaven is saved only by the power of an occasional hypnotic image.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
Turns out to be an exercise in flatulent pretension, puffed up with a bogus, empty "spirituality" and dependent on a plot filled with implausibilities.
|
| 50 |
TV Guide
The conclusion, clearly meant to feel ambiguously poetic, is distinctly unsatisfying.
|
| 42 |
Entertainment Weekly
Further sad evidence that Tom Tykwer, director of the resonant and sense-spinning ''Run Lola Run,'' has turned out to be a one-trick pony -- a maker of softheaded metaphysical claptrap. It's enough to make you want to see him run again.
|
| 40 |
Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
It's a mannered, precious exercise that seems to have less to do with lived moral dilemmas than with the smug piety of its makers.
|
| 30 |
Los Angeles Times
Doesn't have the courage of its conceit, only an abundance of bad ideas and worse taste.
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