Vertical Ray of the Sun, The

Newsweek David Ansen

Vertical Ray slows our rhythms and heightens our senses: it's a shimmering, tactile experience.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

A wholly enveloping experience. Gentle, ravishingly beautiful and awash in everyday sensuality, it so intoxicates you with the elegance and refinement of its filmmaking that even noticing, let alone caring, whether it has a plot starts to seem beside the point.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's a simple story with complex reverberations and undercurrents, as secrets keep being revealed.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Underneath the ravishing imagery however, hearts are in flux.

New Times (L.A.) Bill Gallo

It's a bewildering but deeply satisfying paradox, this constant, nearly silent collision in Tran's films of the visible world and the turbulent, unseen world.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

There are scenes that simply ask the audience to drink in the details, to enjoy the repast, just as much as follow the plot.

Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones

The magnificence of the film's pieces does not quite add up to a satisfying whole.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Beautiful, languorous, passive -- it plays like background music for itself.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

Much of the film is oddly ambiguous, as if Tran used it to explore conflicts of tradition and modernity and never came up with any answers.

Portland Oregonian Staff (Not credited)

Tran's cinematography is delicate yet probing. Faces, especially eyes, tell much of the story.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The cinematography is gorgeous from first frame to last, but the story occasionally rings false.

USA Today Mike Clark

Few filmmakers of the past 20 years have mesmerized as much in their use of crisp, color-drenched photography.

San Francisco Chronicle Wesley Morris

Plays like a holy, erotic mood piece, steeped in so much subdued jungle fever that it practically runs on photosynthesis.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Made of a serene dynamite that's all but unknown to American film audiences.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

An oblique, vaguely sorrowful study in domestic emotion, structured around the small eruptions of feeling -- tenderness, anger, and joy -- that punctuate the slow serenity of daily life.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

For all its virtues, this is not a film to see on less than a good night's sleep.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Here's the downside, and it's not just me: You need a scorecard to keep track of the sisters, their brother, two husbands, a boyfriend, two (or three?) extramarital lovers.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Filled with bird sounds, Vertical Ray is almost surreal in its paradise imagery -- the movie is a sultry, harmoniously expressionistic riot of pale greens and deep yellows.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

If you're looking for refuge from summer movie bombast, it's frequently intoxicating.

TV Guide Ken Fox

This sleepyheaded atmosphere, augmented by the languid songs of Lou Reed and Arab Strap, hangs so heavily over the film that the viewer is lulled into a state dangerously close to unconsciousness.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Story is fairly conventional and not especially well told, though as usual Tran's images are so sensual and beautiful that I was rarely bored or frustrated.