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38
12 Rounds Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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Heaven
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MPAA RATING: R for a scene of sexuality
Starring Cate Blanchett, Giovanni Ribisi, Remo Girone, Stefania Rocca, Alessandro Sperduti, Mattia Sbragia, Stefano Santospago, and Alberto Di Stasio
A luminous and haunting love story, layered, in the tradition of Kieslowski, over a probing exploration of the modern world and its moral choices. (Miramax)
| GENRE(S): | Romance |
| WRITTEN BY: |
Krzysztof Kieslowski
Krzysztof Piesiewicz |
| DIRECTED BY: | Tom Tykwer |
| RELEASE DATE: |
DVD: June 17, 2003 Video: June 17, 2003 Theatrical: October 4, 2002 |
| RUNNING TIME: | 96 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: | USA / UK / France / Italy / Germany |
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...
The average user rating for this movie is 7.4 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Stephen K gave it a10:
Beautiful film with a visually amazing and poetic surprise ending.
John M. gave it a10:
This is a great film about love. Beautifully shot. Wonderfully directed.
Pat C. gave it a6:
This morality play is not too long, but could have been shorter, since character development apparently wasn't a concern. Blanchett sells her character so well that it is easy to overlook that the character is dysfunctional and spectacularly dense. But aren't we all? This seems to be the premise of the movie. Her wish for the end to come is the most poignant moment in the movie, but after that it was my wish too. When one's life warps into the abyss, given the chance one will eventually want to come out the other side. In this case the other side remains unfathomable.
Chad S. gave it a 5:
The ease in which Ribisi communicates with Blanchette is very distracting. What kind of prison is this? Don't the Italians search their prisoners? This wouldn't matter had Blanchette and Ribisi convinced us of their love for each other. There's a long pause before Phillipa answers Flippo(Ribisi)'s father about her love for his son. Blanchette seems to be commenting on her counterpart's performance, before honoring the script's edict that the schoolteacher is supposed to fall in love with the carabineri. It looks more like codependence, but then she has sex with him. This is the third movie (the others being "The Shipping News" and "Charlotte Grey") I've seen in which Blanchette acts her brains out for a production that lets her down.
Kobus B. gave it a 10:
This is the poetry of moviemaking... The camera is making love to lush landscapes and the acting is brilliant. A masterpiece!
Alessandro P. gave it a 2:
Beside minimal aspects which undermine the plausibility of characters (like the the strong accent with which Mr. Ribisi speaks Italian: despite his name, he is evidently no native speaker), the film is not only an insult to logic and plausibility (which still could be accepted), but fails also in the esthetic transfiguration acclaimed by some critics. The "poetic" images of Mr. Tykwer are average for good European cinema and do not struck for their beauty or richness in symbolic like the ones of Mr. Kieslowski (who had probably made a completely different kind of movie). On the contrary: when the fugitives escape to Tuscany (of course...) the pictures of the landscape and of Montepulciano are so trivial and post card-like as only a kitsch German director could imagine. Maybe as a Tuscan myself I'm too sick to see always this kind of images: it were as say a western movie couldn't avoid showing Monumental Valley to be taken seriously. But the worst thing of all is the absolute incapacity to show some psychological change in the characters. In this sense it is a black-and-white picture of a world in which the bad guys are bad and deserve death, while the good guys are just good, no matter what they do. People in this movie act always exactly the way you would expect them to act. The psychological flatness and the missing of every development in the emotional world of the characters makes it really hard to remain in your chair till the end, which is ambiguos and open as many similar conclusions, but as a filmical scene constructed in such a ridiculous way that many people in my movie theater laughed.
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