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Free Zone
New Yorker Films
FILM:
MPAA RATING: Not Rated
Starring
Natalie Portman,
Hana Laszlo,
Hiam Abbass,
Carmen Maura,
Makram Khoury,
Aki Avni,
Uri Klauzner,
and
Liron Levo
Amos Gitai's beautiful new film is a quietly sweeping movie about intersected lives in transit. (New Yorker Films)
| GENRE(S): |
Drama
|
Foreign
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
Amos Gitai
Marie-Jose Sanselme
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
Amos Gitai
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: May 29, 2007
Theatrical: April 7, 2006
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
90 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
Israel / Belgium / France / Spain |
| LANGUAGE(S): |
English / Hebrew / Arabic / Spanish (with English subtitles) |
Best Actress (Laszlo), 2005 Cannes Film Festival
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
70
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
Gitai's experimental technique in Free Zone is dizzying, sometimes thrilling.
67
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
Natalie Portman demonstrates tour de force weeping in the back of a taxi as an American searching for her roots in Israel.
63
Premiere
Ethan Alter
For all its intelligence, Free Zone has disappointingly little to say.
63
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
A minor movie on a major subject, a drama with an almost unbearable lightness.
63
TV Guide
Ken Fox
Unfortunately, the characters feel more like symbols than people, despite strong performances, including what might be Portman's finest work to date.
60
Variety
Derek Elley
Amos Gitai's most satisfying pic since war drama "Kippur." Schematic set-up is given a human face by fine performances and a physical journey that's often more interesting than the characters' emotional ones, which are weakened by the Israeli auteur's tendency toward convenient doctrinaire-ism and chunks of expository dialogue.
58
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Noel Murray
Like a lot of Gitaï's films, Free Zone is part history, part allegory, and part art. Both the history and art hold their fascinations.
58
Portland Oregonian
Marc Mohan
Free Zone is similar to the car-based films of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami but with a more improvised, less-finished feel.
50
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
Unfortunately, the message is made clear within the first 10 minutes, leaving us with about 80 minutes of thematic repetition.
50
New York Daily News
Jack Mathews
The movie works best as a car's-eye travelogue of Jordan. And the three women might be good company on another, less stressful trip. Say to the Caribbean.
50
New York Post
V.A. Musetto
The three women deliver solid performances, but the film is diluted by the use of flashbacks superimposed over present-time scenes. The result is visual chaos.
50
Village Voice
Jessica Winter
Oddly, in representing a private conflict as the microcosm of an unsolvable catastrophe, Free Zone only manages to miniaturize both.
40
Chicago Reader
J.R. Jones
Despite a provocative climax, the movie settles into a ponderous collection of soliloquies.
40
The New York Times
Stephen Holden
If the strong performances of its three stars infuse this metaphorically clotted movie with some life, the screenplay (some of which was improvised) has a weak narrative pulse. This political essay posing as a movie makes the mistake of confusing longwinded storytelling with compelling drama.
30
The Hollywood Reporter
Duane Byrge
A road picture mired by unsteady camera work, lackadaisical pacing and cumbersome speechmaking, Free Zone is an excruciating cinematic trek. Israeli director Amos Gitai's narrative, both visually and conversationally, is a disappointing dud.
 The average user rating for this movie is 0.0 (out of 10) based on 0 User Votes
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