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Year One
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Solomon and Gaenor
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 22 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 9 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Romance
Written by: Paul Morrisson
Directed by: Paul Morrisson
Release Date:
Theatrical: August 25, 2000
DVD: January 30, 2001
Running Time: 102 minutes, Color
Origin: UK
Summary
RATING: R for sexuality and a scene of violence
Starring Ioan Gruffudd, Nia Roberts, Sue Jones-Davies, and William Thomas
Set in the Welsh Valleys around 1911, Solomon & Gaenor tells the moving and ultimately tragic story of the love between a Welsh girl and a Jewish boy. (Sony Pictures Classics)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database 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...
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
A "Romeo and Juliet" tragedy of surprising power.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
Its pleasures aren't so much in the inevitable plot complications, but in the passion of the performances and the spare beauty of the elegant framing and photography.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
Told so simply and powerfully that it seems to carry echoes of earlier, timeless tales.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
With Solomon & Gaenor, it is hard to overlook the folly of the characters. Does it count as a tragedy when the characters get more or less what they were asking for?
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
Does an almost dismayingly good job of conveying its characters' grim, bare-bones existence and the stultifying sexual and religious taboos that the lovers flout.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
It doesn't lack for emotional intensity or persuasive, three-dimensional characters.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector
A graceful, understated sense of period allows the behavior of the characters in this love story to be unusually nuanced, making their experiences seem uncontrived as well as archetypal.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Jay Carr
It takes us nowhere we haven't been before, except geographically.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris
The film is in the key of "Romeo and Juliet," and it's a one-note tune.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Well-meaning portrait of intolerance concludes as grand tragic melodrama, executed with a stately beauty in somber colors.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
The landscape and the lovers are pretty to look at, but two households divided should really pack more of a punch.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly F. X. Feeney
First-time writer-director Paul Morrison has a gift for evoking a time and place.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf
Although Morrison's drama feels increasingly forced and manipulative as the movie rolls along, the movie is competent if painfully predictable.
Read Full Review >Film.com Jared Rapfogel
There's nothing terribly wrong with the movie, but nothing terribly right about it either.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Jessica Winter
Paul Morrison's relentlessly unsurprising staging of a "Romeo and Juliet" story fetishizes its accelerating tragedies with morbid solemnity.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas
By the time the heavy-handed Solomon & Gaenor is over, it has become such a punishing exercise in the self-evident that one is left numb and eager for escape.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 8.3 (out of 10) based on 9 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
r h gave it a0:
Really bad! boring and hard to follow.
Chad S. gave it a 5:
After a roll in the hay, literally, Gaenor reaches down for Solomon's crotch, and remarks that he's different "down there", meaning, he's uncircumcised. In "Boys Don't Cry", Lana(Chloe Sevigny) sees Brandon (Hillary Swank)'s clevage, but prefers the illusion that she's a boy. In "Solomon & Gaenor", Gaenor's scenes with Solomon would've worked better had she been in denial of his heritage, but the girl is clueless. I was certain of this when she appears at Solomon's door and tells him that he was hard to find, like a community concentrated with Jews was the last place she searched. Gaenor's kind of stupid, and her ravenous sexual appetite, could be a behavioral anachorism. Solomon is no rocket scientist himself. Unbridled passion breeds irrationality, but Ioann Gruffudd's fatalism seems more asinine than inevitable because Gaenor doesn't strike me as suicide material.
Peter F. gave it a 10:
To simplify, one might call this "Romeo and Juliet" in Wales but there is more to the story; in particular, a Jewish peddler in a Christian community, a miners' strike, a pogrom that follows a labor dispute. The film is incredibly well-acted and beautifully composed.
Jonathan C. gave it a 10:
I was absolutely moved ... what a tragedy ... great acting by both roberts and gruffudd.
Matthew P. gave it a 10:
Great movie, great story. The acting is supurb. 10 out of 10 from me.
