A thoughtful, if sentimental, semi-successful attempt to craft a drama about life and choice around the difficult subject matter of a school shooting.
Comment
03/28/09
The Life Before Her Eyes (2008)
24
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:91
Fresh:22
Rotten:69
Average Rating:4.4/10
Consensus: Despite earnest performances, Life Before Her Eyes is a confusing, painfully overwrought melodrama.
Theatrical Release:27-03-2009
Synopsis: Imaginative, impetuous and wild, Diana (Evan Rachel Wood) can’t wait for her adult life to begin. Whiling away the final days of high school in the lush springtime, Diana tests her limits with sex... [More]
Starring: Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, Eva Amurri, Oscar Isaac
Director: Vadim Perelman
Reviews for The Life Before Her Eyes
Top CriticA touching tale from director Vadim Perelman with a surprise ending that leaves you plenty to ponder.
03/28/09
Flitting back and forth in time, it's too confusing to entertain, while Wood and Thurman look nothing like one another, making for a disjointed and often dire experience.
03/27/09
The film’s dogged repetition of its pivotal scene has to go somewhere, but it’s enslaved to a narrative conceit even M Night Shyamalan might find a trifle gimmicky.
03/27/09
Top CriticVadim Perelman's drama is both tasteful and tedious. With its honeyed visuals, affluent air and coy portents of disaster, it's like an advert for private health care played out on an endless loop.
03/27/09
Top Critic[Perelman] over-explains everything at the end with a montage of repeated scenes that ensures you never need see this film more than once.
08/07/09
An American high school drama with a tiresomely familiar twist.
03/31/09
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09/29/07
The movie’s relentless dream-like quality could induce slack-jawed wonder…or chronic narcolepsy depending how receptive the viewer is to non-linear narrative and super-stylised flights of fancy.
03/28/09
Absorbing.
03/27/09
In the hands of the director Vadim Perelman, it becomes a jumble of dramatic scenes and disorientating flashbacks that merge into a confusing, stream-of-consciousness narrative, and the twist, when it comes, is a complete cheat.
03/31/09
The ending is as baffling as anything preceding it - giving rise to a genre conflict situation.
03/26/09
A sudsy potboiler with a twist you can see coming from the title.
03/28/09
Ambition and accomplishment are aeons apart in this would-be meaningful drama.
03/27/09
Top CriticSurely the point of a “twist” is that it should slot into the plot with a satisfying click, not that it should invalidate 50 per cent of what came before it?
03/27/09
Top CriticPart Elephant, part Jacob’s Ladder, moments of bruising power are dulled by overwrought symbolism and a baffling wrap-up.
03/27/09
Poorly conceived, badly written and ultimately ridiculous drama with a jaw-droppingly crass twist ending that backfires horribly.
03/27/09
Full of fussed-over significant images and delicately planned interlocking narrative motives, and it's about as subtle and clever as somebody clubbing you over the head with a folding chair
04/29/08
And then, THUD. Like an Acme anvil, the ending smashes everything to smithereens and you're left as discouraged as Wile E. Coyote.
05/01/08
... not so much a bad movie as an infuriating one, a pretty empty thing that wants desperately to be loved for its deep thoughts.
05/09/08
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