Sunshine

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

From the outside, Sunshine sounds like the most boring film on Earth. In fact, it's glorious.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A powerful film.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

So filled with riches that it seems a bit unfair to single out Szabo and Fiennes, no matter how outstanding their work.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's a brilliant, profound movie, but it's almost no fun at all.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

An incredibly ambitious film and one of the most highly accomplished of the year.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

While inevitably oversimplified, is never less than engrossing.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

Leaves you with a sense of quiet, chastened grace.

LA Weekly F. X. Feeney

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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The sunshine in Sunshine comes from women around him (Fiennes).

Miami Herald Marta Barber

For filmgoers not interested in history, Sunshine might be a three-hour investment they may not want to undertake.

USA Today Mike Clark

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.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

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.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The filmmaking is uninspired and Fiennes inexplicably plays three different characters with exactly the same acting style.

TV Guide Ken Fox

That this handsome, three-hour extravaganza coheres at all is a small miracle; that it actually leaves you wanting more is a major one.

Time Richard Schickel

Sunshine is a trifle schematic. But it also makes you feel, quite poignantly, the crushing tides of history: heedless, inhuman--and tragic.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

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.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

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.

Village Voice Amy Taubin

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."

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

Szabo doesn't bring the film to its senses until just past the halfway point.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

The saga might have worked better as a novel, where we could cast the characters with our imaginations, and keep them straight.

Variety Eddie Cockrell

Well-intentioned but never entirely engaging chronicle.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

Eventually succumbs to fatal overlength.

Film.com Gemma Files

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.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Ultimately one of those sprawling epics best suited for a rainy day.

Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer

That this mess should come from the hand of Istvan Szabo, the brilliant Hungarian director of "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is the real shocker.