Metacritic Film

Snow Cake

Starring Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Fox, Jayne Eastwood, Emily Hampshire, and James Allodi

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

IFC First Take
Drama  |  Foreign
112 minutes | Color
UK / Canada
Released In Theaters April 27, 2007

Alex Hughes, recently freed from prison, begrudgingly picks up a vivacious 19-year-old hitchhiker, Vivienne, while driving through Ontario. When the car is hit by a truck on the outskirts of her home town, Vivienne dies instantly. Shocked and stranded in snowbound Wawa, Alex is drawn to seek out Vivienne’s mother, an autistic woman, to talk to her in person about the fate of her daughter. (IFC First Take)

WRITTEN BY
Angela Pell

DIRECTED BY
Marc Evans

Overall Metascore

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

54 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 USA Today
Most noteworthy for the performance of Sigourney Weaver as Linda, an autistic woman.
75 TV Guide
Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman imbue screenwriter Angela Pell's characters with a quiet authenticity that's surprisingly moving.
70 Los Angeles Times
Modest but well wrought and witty, Snow Cake is full of unexpected moments and clever observations.
70 Village Voice Ella Taylor
Does sidle up to the brink of mawkishness, but it pulls back so nicely into Weaver's rich, hard-headed evocation of Linda's limitations.
70 Film Threat Felix Vasquez, Jr.
Rickman and Weaver sell it, and the utterly heart wrenching finale is the big pay off, and the experience is worth it.
63 Boston Globe
Snow Cake is dazlious, too: overly forced, a shade too whimsical, but filling a void other words and other movies haven't the nerve or errant taste to confront.
63 New York Daily News
In the end, Weaver provides a moving and sensitive portrait of one person out of an estimated 400,000 in America with this mental disorder we are just beginning to understand.
58 The Onion (A.V. Club)
If only Snow Cake had hewed closer to this idea of showing what an adult autist's life and experiences are like, rather than getting caught up in Rickman's rote re-awakening, it could've been as powerful as it strains to be.
50 The Hollywood Reporter
The mental and physical landscape would do justice to an Atom Egoyan film, but in this film, the key dramatic moments feel as forced as they are predictable.
50 Variety
Boosted by a delish performance from Carrie-Anne Moss as a local vamp who helps unthaw the Englishman, but holed beneath the waterline by a gratingly miscast Sigourney Weaver as the persnickety autistic.
50 The New York Times
Like "I Am Sam," it is a film that tests your cynicism.
50 New York Post
Alan Rickman holds the film together.
50 Entertainment Weekly
An awfully tidy, infernally sparkly study in skewed blessings, made manifest by Committed Acting from Sigourney Weaver.
50 Washington Post
Never gets as emotionally involving, or persuasive, as the moviemakers intend it to.
40 Salon.com
The picture is so drab and listless that it often feels like punishment, even though Rickman gives a fine performance, one that's heartfelt as well as characteristically elegant (not to mention sexy).

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