| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
From the outside, Sunshine sounds like the most boring film on Earth. In fact, it's glorious.
|
| 100 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
A powerful film.
|
| 91 |
Portland Oregonian
So filled with riches that it seems a bit unfair to single out Szabo and Fiennes, no matter how outstanding their work.
|
| 90 |
Washington Post
It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
An incredibly ambitious film and one of the most highly accomplished of the year.
|
| 83 |
Entertainment Weekly
While inevitably oversimplified, is never less than engrossing.
|
| 80 |
The New York Times
Leaves you with a sense of quiet, chastened grace.
|
| 80 |
LA Weekly
What makes Sunshine unique, what rewards a first viewing and lives in the mind long thereafter, is that Szabo has attempted to place Judaism and Christianity on a continuum that is both historically truthful and highly personal.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
This is a movie of substance and thrilling historical sweep, and its three hours allow Szabo to show the family's destiny forming and shifting under pressure.
|
| 75 |
Charlotte Observer
The sunshine in Sunshine comes from women around him (Fiennes).
|
| 75 |
Miami Herald
Marta Barber
For filmgoers not interested in history, Sunshine might be a three-hour investment they may not want to undertake.
|
| 75 |
USA Today
This movie doesn't make you think you are watching art. It's closer to a high-end TV movie with lots of familiar faces.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
It is often as powerful as it is elegantly shot. Unfortunately, Szabo tends to tell this rather predictable tale in an obvious yet uneven way.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
The filmmaking is uninspired and Fiennes inexplicably plays three different characters with exactly the same acting style.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
That this handsome, three-hour extravaganza coheres at all is a small miracle; that it actually leaves you wanting more is a major one.
|
| 70 |
Time
Sunshine is a trifle schematic. But it also makes you feel, quite poignantly, the crushing tides of history: heedless, inhuman--and tragic.
|
| 70 |
Chicago Reader
Many of the plot points seem belabored because they're introduced in the voice-over, then ploddingly dramatized, then analyzed by the family over meals.
|
| 70 |
Los Angeles Times
It is a superb period re-creation and boasts a formidable international cast.... It is nevertheless absorbing and illuminating in regard to the eras its spans but is also pretty wearying by the time it starts winding down.
|
| 70 |
Village Voice
Despite Sunshine's historical scope and multiplicity of characters, it doesn't shed half as much light on its subject -- identity and anti-Semitism -- as does, for example, Agnieszka Holland's claustrophobic chamber piece "Angry Harvest."
|
| 63 |
San Francisco Examiner
Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.
|
| 63 |
New York Daily News
The saga might have worked better as a novel, where we could cast the characters with our imaginations, and keep them straight.
|
| 60 |
Variety
Eddie Cockrell
Well-intentioned but never entirely engaging chronicle.
|
| 52 |
Mr. Showbiz
Eventually succumbs to fatal overlength.
|
| 50 |
Film.com
Sunshine's historical reference-heavy narrative walks a fine line between novelistic tragedy and comically overstated melodrama, falling down on the job more than once.
|
| 50 |
Austin Chronicle
Ultimately one of those sprawling epics best suited for a rainy day.
|
| 30 |
Dallas Observer
That this mess should come from the hand of Istvan Szabo, the brilliant Hungarian director of "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is the real shocker.
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