DVD
Upcoming Release Calendar
Film Awards & Top 10s By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
Best / Worst of the Decade
Recent DVD/Video Releases
60
9
xx
Across the Hall
56
Adam
37
Amelia
73
Amreeka
35
Babysitters, The
70
Big Fan
57
Boys Are Back, The
81
Bright Star![]()
71
Bronson
60
Brothers at War
55
Brothers Bloom, The
45
Burning Plain, The
xx
Carriers
64
Che
57
Chelsea on the Rocks
66
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
23
Couples Retreat
54
Dare
68
Departures
19
Downloading Nancy
55
Endgame
39
Fame
30
Final Destination, The
27
Gamer
50
Give Me Your Hand
46
Halloween II
73
House of the Devil, The
94
Hurt Locker, The![]()
55
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
17
I Hate Valentine's Day
26
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
83
In the Loop![]()
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
41
Little Ashes
80
Lorna's Silence
33
Love Happens
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
xx
Ministers, The
67
Moon
59
More Than a Game
49
New York, I Love You
66
No Impact Man
47
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
28
Pandorum
68
Paranormal Activity
85
Passing Strange![]()
63
Perfect Getaway, A
44
Peter and Vandy
54
Pontypool
35
Post Grad
30
Saw VI
79
Serious Man, A
36
Serious Moonlight
76
Soul Power
40
Spiral
39
St. Trinian's
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
47
Time Traveler's Wife
43
Tru Loved
61
Trucker
47
Weather Girl
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Life Before Her Eyes, The

Generally unfavorable reviews
Based on 25 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 13 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama | Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Emil Stern
Directed by: Vadim Perelman
Release Date:
Theatrical: April 18, 2008
DVD: August 19, 2008
Running Time: 90 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for violent and disturbing content, language and brief drug use
Starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Eva Amurri
The Life Before Her Eyes is an intense and visually evocative drama about the loss of youth, investigating how a single moment in time can define an entire life. Based on Laura Kasischke's visionary novel, the story hinges on a pivotal confrontation: two high school girls held captive by a gunman and forced to make the terrifying choice as to who will live and who will die. The Life Before Her Eyes explores the reverberations stemming from the collision of past and future, reality and dream. Life can end in an instant--yet the echoes of possible futures remain inescapable. Moving backward and forward in time, it combines the dramatic intensity of Sophie's Choice with the eerie mystery of a ghost story like The Others. (Magnolia)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: House of Sand and Fog
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
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...
San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
Emotionally sophisticated, humane and worth talking about for hours.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
The fact that I didn't understand a film, that its ending can be interpreted at least two ways and maybe three – all likely to be "true" – usually sends me growling in disgust from the theater. But The Life Before Her Eyes has grown on me in memory.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Of the two timelines, the one featuring the teenage Diana is more involving than the one featuring the adult version. Both lead actresses give fine performances, but Thurman has less material to work with.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
Though atmospheric and occasionally suspenseful, its gimmickry keeps it from being transcendent.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Uma Thurman delivers a mesmerizing performance in The Life Before Her Eyes, a film that, once seen and fully digested, exerts the same haunting pull as the shattering events it chronicles.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
The best thing about The Life Before Her Eyes, a somber meditation on fate and friendship, is the way it captures the close relationship between two teenage girls.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen
Boasting two terrific performances by Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood as the adult and teenage versions of the same character.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White
The Life Before Her Eyes is like one of those puzzles. There is something wrong in each scene, and the viewer zeroes in on the elements that don't fit, wondering if there is a purpose behind them.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
It's sad to see such subtle, wrenchingly emotional work expended on such trifling material.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Sid Smith
Beautiful, horrifying, exasperating and just plain weird.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
Director Vadim Perelman is big on slo-mo lyrical effects and confusing time shifts, making the movie unnecessarily arty and detracting from what could have been a searing psychological study.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, The Life Before Her Eyes contradicts the director’s claim in the production notes that the movie “is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects.”
Read Full Review >Variety John Anderson
A femme-centric drama about the aftermath of a high school massacre, profoundly confusing "In Bloom" arrives at some very tenuous moral conclusions that might alienate much of its supposed target audience.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Ella Taylor
Moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L'Oreal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
While "House of Sand and Fog" remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Janice Page
When the big twist is revealed at the end of The Life Before Her Eyes, you might think the only way to appreciate its cleverness is to see the film again. I did that. It didn't help.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
Perelman pays such cooing attention to surfaces that our response to violence carries no more importance than our response to the delicate jewelry around the adult Diana's neck.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Perelman eases the transitions between the past and the present with echoing phrases and situations, but they all seem rather pat and contrived. Does he really think that repeated refrains from the Zombies oldie, "She's Not There," won't be a dead (so to speak) giveaway?
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
An overwrought and patently offensive anti- abortion drama from the director of the accomplished "House of Sand and Fog."
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
What this heavy-handed film mainly has to endure is a clunky story structure and an ending that wasn't original when it was seen four decades ago on "The Twilight Zone."
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games" and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win--but only because he’s working so much harder to be noxious.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Consider this more a consumer warning than a movie review: The Life Before Her Eyes will draw you in, then intrigue you, then bore you, then bewilder you, then make you crazy with its incessant flashbacks and flash forwards, and finally leave you feeling like the victim of a fraud.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.6 (out of 10) based on 13 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Enrique gave it a4:
Barely convincing. Uma Thurmann is fine but the script is too contrived. A big disappointment.
Richard . gave it a10:
The critics could not be more wrong. This is the most profound and emotional film of the year so far. It's sad that many people will not see it based on the copycat critics reviews.
Chad S. gave it an8:
When the good girl met the bad girl in Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen", the bad girl exerted her will on the good girl, and the good girl became bad. The good girl was played by Evan Rachel Wood. This time, in "The Life Before Her Eyes", she's the bad girl, who meets a good girl, and she becomes a good girl, too. The good girl is played by Eva Amurri. Diana McFee(Uma Thurman) can thank Maureen for the woman she is today. But where is Maureen? The last time we saw her, she was in a high school girls' bathroom with her best friend and the gunman. Since "The Life Before Her Eyes" predicates itself as a sort of "Donnie Darko" for women, Maureen's fate isn't wholly determinisitic, because the past is present, the past is fluid, as Diana rewrites her history, her husband and child's history, and especially, Maureen's history from a contemporary epoch(the weeks leading up to the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre) that runs parallel to the past. Like Alejandro Agresti's "The Lake House", this "My So-Called Elephant" is sci-fi for women who don't like sci-fi.
Bryn hotness gave it a10:
I thought this movie was phenomenal and i watched some of this movie was shot on the street right next to mine and i think all fo the actors and actresses did a teriffic job!!!!!!!!
Paul B. gave it a2:
Uma Thurman continues her losing streak in a poorly-constructed script punctuated with ridiculous lines such as, "I don't know about you but I could use some soup!"
