There are intriguing issues swirling around the film, but [director] Kofman never brings it to a boil, never finds the deeper, truer meaning inside the ideas he is grappling with.
Comment
05/30/08
The Memory Thief (2008)
77 %
Reviews Counted: 13 Fresh: 10 Rotten:3 Average Rating: 6.5/10
Synopsis: The Memory Thief tells the story of Lukas - an aimless, haunted young man in contemporary L.A. who buries thoughts of his own past in the humdrum routine of a tollbooth clerk. A chance encounter with a Holocaust survivor suddenly brings into focus a world and an identity he embraces with... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Mark Webber, Rachel Miner, Jerry Adler, Patrick Bauchau
Reviews
1 - 13 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Top Critic
Director Gil Kofman's attempt is noble in trying to show this descent into madness, but something rings false.
05/09/08
While the film tends to talk over itself in its attempt to say all it needs to say on the subject, his film's uncompromisingly bleak vision is a bracing alternative.
05/09/08
In The Memory Thief, a strange and melancholy journey to the heart of madness, a rootless young man finds meaning in the horrors of a stolen past.
05/09/08
Top Critic
Another case study delving into the hubris and insult of trying too hard to feel someone else's pain.
05/09/08
The film is (perhaps deliberately) as unbalanced as its protagonist, one whose fury ultimately seems directed either nowhere in particular or in too many directions at once -- until things eventually devolve into a Taxi Driver riff.
05/07/08
Kofman includes real-life Holocaust survivors in his cast, a bold and unsettling stroke in a fictional story that's more challenging than most documentaries about the subject.
05/07/08
The Memory Thief, the first narrative feature by Gil Kofman, grants intimate entrance into a needy person's life -- a life bent around the facts of the darkest hours of the 20th century.
03/28/08
Tragedy and closure, memory and truth are the subjects of writer/director Gil Kofman's first narrative feature.
03/20/08
A Holocaust movie with quite an original twist--about a tollbooth collector who imagines himself to be a survivor of Nazi horrors.
03/19/08
The deeply felt performances from [Mark] Webber and Jerry Adler overwhelm the film about a young man whose way of connecting to others is to mirror them.
04/20/07
The ambitious Memory is about coming to grips with the past (or not) and the ownership of memory.
04/19/07
1 - 13 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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