A Screaming Man Reviews

It's extremely well-intended and contains the broad strokes of a much better movie, but A Screaming Man's inhuman characters lead to an unfortunate descent into clichés.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.7/10

[Director] Haroun fails to lift his universal fable to the height of an epic, whatever its budget.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Chadian winner at Cannes lacks density

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A beautifully photographed tale of betrayal, A Screaming Man nevertheless turns on an improbable transformation by the main character, a father in war-torn Chad.

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Engrossing and enlightening but it doesn't quite live up to its considerable promise.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Draws from a personal understanding that gives its fictional story a tinge of emotional reportage.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Despite its title, the film is a quiet rebuke of war and its impact on everyday life: people and families. Without a single battle scene, the horrors of war bleed through the screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Largely a quiet film, though its emotions are loud. Feelings aren't discussed as much as they unfold.

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Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's movie... shows the quiet desperation that results from inner and outer conflicts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

"A Screaming Man" is a quiet, tender, finally wrenching story of an individual at the intersection of the personal and the political.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Ingenious and moving...

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This tragedy of parental betrayal is personal in scope but universal in impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

The characterizations never comfortably accommodate Haroun's pat metaphor, though his stoic visual storytelling has an oblique gravity, suggesting a slightly altered meaning to each surveying shot of the poolside patio.

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Haroun deploys no rhetoric at all. His cinema is as mute as Bresson, yet as incandescent.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Quietly powerful.

full review at Movies for the Masses

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Betrayal, guilt, denial, faith and secrecy all roil about beneath the film's placid, almost wordless surface, which is beautifully observed with a stately, Ozu-like calmness.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

The director's style is certainly deliberate, but the gradual build-up of events is undeniably thought-provoking, played out in images of stark beauty as Adam's personal odyssey reaches a powerful and moving conclusion.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

It's an intelligent, good-looking film and one that confirms Haroun as one of Africa's leading filmmakers.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

One man's dark night of the soul brought on by civil war in Chad.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5