Average Rating: 7.8/10
Reviews Counted: 73
Fresh: 65 | Rotten: 8
Evocative and complex, this story of struggling immigrants in Germany will stay with you after you leave the theater.
Average Rating: 7.7/10
Critic Reviews: 23
Fresh: 21 | Rotten: 2
Evocative and complex, this story of struggling immigrants in Germany will stay with you after you leave the theater.
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Average Rating: 4.1/5
User Ratings: 14,849
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The winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, director Fatih Akin's deeply humanistic, multi-layered drama follows the stories of six people -- four Turks and two Germans -- as they realize the meaning of love while facing the harsh realities of the world we live in. Nejat is a second-generation Turkish immigrant living in Germany. His father Ali is a retired widower. When lonely Ali invites pretty prostitute Yeter to move in with him, Nejat makes no attempt to mask
May 23, 2007 Wide
Oct 14, 2008
$0.6M
Strand
All Critics (75) | Top Critics (25) | Fresh (66) | Rotten (8) | DVD (2)
What we don't suspect, going in, is that a film of such plain-speaking admonitions can exploit the element of surprise. Yet this heartfelt and precisely assembled drama does just that.
Propelled by the beautiful camerawork and scenery that moves back and forth between pastoral idyll and urban chaos as it takes the viewer on a journey that ends with a final image as quiet and beautiful as any in recent cinema.
Loneliness, loss and capricious love guide the fortunes of three families in this powerful, beautifully realized drama by German-Turkish writer/director Fatih Akin.
The Edge of Heaven explores topics as varied as the tensions that accompany multiculturalism and globalization to the simpler human drama of how individuals cope with losses for which they bear a portion of the responsibility.
The care that Akin expends on his people is skimped in the structure of his screenplay.
In a single two-hour film, Akin strikes the notes of emotional distress, geographical dissonance, generational discord, and nearly divine convergence that Kieslowski orchestrated over nearly six hours.
True to its title, The Edge of Heaven hangs uneasily between two spheres.
Hanna Schygulla cuts through platitudes with a privately fierce, graceful sense of spiritual space
Un drama sobre encuentros y desencuentros, azar y fatalidad, entre Alemania y Turquía. No carece de interés, pero le falta rigurosidad dramática.
It isn't enough for director and writer Fatih Akin to show that we're all only a few degrees from each other across countries; rather, he's also interested in the level of connectedness.
Another thought-provoking, cross-cultural masterpiece from Turkish-German director Fatih Akin.
[It's] a much-needed maturation of the Babel/Crash formula but also fails to rattle your bones the way those movies did. Pick your poison, I suppose.
He [director Fatih Akin] makes the random moments and chance encounters of life seem both utterly unpredictable and completely inevitable.
Intricate emotionally as well as in narrative terms, poignant but not mawkish, and told in an austerely compelling style, this is a wise and absorbing drama.
A transcendent film experience.
This is a movie that was pretty involving, which makes me all the more frustrated that it just ends without any closure. Sometimes it works in movies, but here it would have helped to have the story fully completed.
The actors, except for Schygulla, are unknown - and they bring an air of weary authenticity to their roles.
What Akin says about parent-child relationships is perceptive, and the cast is very good.
Akin doesn't hide the fatal destinies of major characters... but it's the lives of the survivors and how they choose to carry on that carry these crisscrossing stories.
"The Edge of Heaven" is a magical film that must be seen. It didn't receive a strong distribution deal in the United States (big surprise), so it will take effort to find it. But it is so worth the work. Germano-Turkish writer/ director Faith Akin is one of the true greats. He and Joachim Trier ("Reprise") are the
August 31, 2008
Super Reviewer
Gorgeously shot tale with sumptuous locations and a pleasing symmetry to the narrative. A variety of atypical actors and scenarios give it a real freshness.
January 1, 2008
Super Reviewer
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