What you get, in the end, is a pair of fine performances (from Thurman and Wood) and a technically well-made film that arrives at a foregone conclusion.
Comment
04/25/08
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
Thoroughly thought through and photographed with imagination and psychological penetration, it's the product of a very shrewd directorial hand.
04/25/08
Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama.
04/25/08
The Life Before Her Eyes might offer a fresh perspective on aborted dreams, but its insights are buried under stale, inflated moviemaking.
04/25/08
Perelman eases the transitions between the past and the present with echoing phrases and situations, but they all seem rather pat and contrived.
04/25/08
Not a film entirely devoid of virtue, though it comes closer to that mark than any movie I've seen this year--closer than any movie I'd care to see in any year.
04/25/08
Top CriticIf The Life Before Her Eyes has a message, it is that life is too short to squander on foolhardy meaninglessness. Take the film's advice. Stay away.
04/25/08
Director Vadim Perelman fetishizes the threat of violence with his caressing camera.
04/25/08
The talented crew and ensemble did everything they could to raise an incredibly flawed screenplay above its Lifetime TV Movie roots but ultimately could only take it so far.
04/25/08
There are two very fine performances here -- Wood's and Amurri's -- but they're not strong enough to rise above the metaphor-laden script.
04/25/08
[Perelman] makes like a poet on Provigil and starts dumping symbolism by the bucket, until you can't help but sit there, Beavis & Butt-Head-like, thinking, 'This means something.'
04/24/08
Too many of the scenes, however, are the standard fodder of which mediocre movies are made.
04/24/08
Matters of taste aside, the film's platitude-heavy dialogue and pseudo-philosophical themes are ridiculous.
04/24/08
It wears you down, and maybe that's why the conclusion doesn't pack much of a punch.
04/24/08
It's too clever by half, too facile in its use of sensationalist headline material, too far-fetched in its psychological fancy.
04/24/08
Uma Thurman delivers a mesmerizing performance in The Life Before Her Eyes, a film that, once seen and fully digested, exerts the same haunting pull as the shattering events it chronicles.
04/24/08
A fictional drama that uses a Columbine-like high school massacre as a plot device had better have solid justification for engaging our grief and horror.
04/24/08
I think it’s a strong film.
04/21/08
An anti-abortion movement propaganda screed masquerading as a teen angst drama. All that's missing are the religious right pamphlet tables in the theater lobbies. There's apparently a new kind of female road movie out there, called the guilt trip.
04/19/08
The Life Before Her Eyes will draw you in, then intrigue you, then bore you, then bewilder you, then make you crazy with its incessant flashbacks and flash forwards, and finally leave you feeling like the victim of a fraud.
04/18/08
Latest News for The Life Before Her Eyes
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