Amour Reviews
Trintignant perfectly captures the resolve that eventually borders on obsession, as the woman he loves gradually, maddeningly, disappears before his eyes, and he does whatever he can to prevent it, though he knows it's impossible.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Many viewers will find echoes of their grandparents, parents, or even themselves in these characters.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A movie that is utterly worthy of its all-encompassing title.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The resulting interplay of ruthless restraint and unavoidable passion, plus the film's refusal to shrink from depicting the inevitable horrors of physical deterioration, is devastating.
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| Original Score: 5/5
In many ways it's the best horror film I've ever seen. At the same time, it's hard to recommend; I believe I will be struggling to forget this film as long as I live. I doubt I'll succeed.
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| Original Score: A
As remarkable as Haneke's films are, not a one has been as transcendently generous as Amour, which is nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best foreign-language film.
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| Original Score: 4/4
"Amour" isn't easy to watch, but its rewards are many.
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| Original Score: 4/4
"Amour" isn't just a great movie, it's a movie that may actually do you some good.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Shot in long, static takes, Amour stares directly into the indignities of old age and the curse of a slow death.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Each actor draws on a lifetime's worth of experience, performing with grace and rare, uncompromising realism.
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| Original Score: 4/4
There's nowhere to hide: The film cuts no corners and stings with the authenticity of life's fragility.
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| Original Score: A
The movie avoids melodrama; instead, it's just extraordinarily intimate, with touches of visual poetry like the pigeon that gets into the apartment and won't leave, an image of our own heedless tenacity.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The film is a graphic portrayal of the unfunny end game we're all fated to play; the title is just a simple declaration of how best to play it.
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| Original Score: 4/4
"Amour" is also unforgettable and one of a kind, two hours of torment that, in the end, you will probably not regret.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Small, sure and stunningly acted, this is a picture of exacting control, which is to be expected from Haneke, whose works include Cache and The White Ribbon.
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| Original Score: 4/4
[Haneke] has put his finger on a very particular kind of heartbreak: seeing a lover give up not on you but on the life you've shared.
Toronto Star
Top CriticAmour is the simplest yet most passionate film of Haneke's incredible career.
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| Original Score: 4/4
As it unflinchingly faces mortality, Amour is full of incomparably beautiful and sad moments.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Old age isn't for sissies, and neither is this film.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A wrenching film that is sure to bring tears -- a lot of tears -- to your eyes and manages, in many ways, to affirm that love is worth sharing and life is worth living even in the most final of days.
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| Original Score: 4/4
There have been many invasions in Haneke's work, and there is indeed an attempted break-in at the start of this film, but nothing compares with the looming approach of mortality.
Amour might seem hardly the stuff of entertainment, yet the reason it has been acclaimed isn't mysterious. Confronting death, it studies life, closely and lovingly.
Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.
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| Original Score: B-
A compassionate, rigorously unsentimental masterwork from a director who doesn't normally truck in emotions like the one named in the title.
This is an unforgettable love story set at the close of day, as tragic and beautiful in its way as "Tristan und Isolde," and a portrait of the impossible beauty and fragility of life that will yield new experiences to every viewer and every viewing.
"Amour" is a perfectly made, tremendously involving film that, nonetheless, is very difficult to watch, particularly if you're past the midpoint in your life.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A relentless and shattering masterwork, 'Amour' breaks the heart but satisfies the soul.
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| Original Score: 5/5
All great films have imagination; this one also has the sense of experience.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Growing old is a war, and movies rarely go there. Michael Haneke's amazing, dignified "Amour" is the exception.
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| Original Score: 5/5
In the history of movies about love, Amour shall last forever.
If you've seen someone you love through their dying, it may burn you up - but in an illuminating way.
Haneke remains, by his rules, infallible. So what?
While this might not be the post-gift-unwrapping movie destination of choice this holiday season, the brutal honesty and emotional truth of Amour make it one of this year's best films.
It will surely strike a chord with anyone who's watched a loved one slip away in this manner, whether it's a parent or a spouse.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Consummate acting helps ease a painful watch, as Michael Haneke describes the ultimate test of love in a profoundly honest study of sickness and dying.
The title is french for love. The movie itself, indisputably the year's best foreign-language film and an Oscar front-runner, defines what love is. And it does it the hard way.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
I urge you to share its sweetness and wisdom, and learn something.
Haneke ... knows the reality of growing old together isn't for the faint of heart.
A sober, gorgeously directed portrait of an elderly couple facing terrifying questions of life and death.
A tender, wrenching, impeccably directed story of love and death.
Transfixing and extraordinarily touching, perhaps the most hauntingly honest movie about old age ever made
Infused with its namesake, this gentle tragedy is the filmmaker's least complicated work to date, a streamlined tearjerker that respects viewers enough to not jerk the tears out of them.
Considering Haneke's confrontational past, this poignantly acted, uncommonly tender two-hander makes a doubly powerful statement about man's capacity for dignity and sensitivity when confronted with the inevitable cruelty of nature.
'Amour' is a devastating, highly intelligent and astonishingly performed work. It's a masterpiece.
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| Original Score: 5/5
