Average Rating: 6.5/10
Reviews Counted: 118
Fresh: 79 | Rotten: 39
Although it excises much from its famously dense source material, Everything is Illuminated is a quirky, ambitious debut film from Liev Schreiber.
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Critic Reviews: 31
Fresh: 17 | Rotten: 14
Although it excises much from its famously dense source material, Everything is Illuminated is a quirky, ambitious debut film from Liev Schreiber.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.9/5
User Ratings: 56,785
A young man takes a strange and unexpectedly funny journey in search of a family heroine he's never known in this screen adaptation of the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Jonathan (Elijah Wood) is a lifelong collector of any and all objects pertaining to his family, and he has become obsessed with a woman he's never met. The woman saved the life of his grandfather during World War II, when the Ukrainian town where he was born was destroyed by Nazi troops. Wanting to know more about the woman,
Sep 16, 2005 Limited
Mar 21, 2006
$1.6M
Warner Independent Pictures
All Critics (129) | Top Critics (32) | Fresh (80) | Rotten (41) | DVD (12)
It's funny and warm, with the sting of the horrific event that triggered the trip giving it a melancholy feel.
It's profound in the way that life is profound in hindsight, its view of the past both fixed in history and mutable in the telling. And it's exquisitely tender.
This isn't a frivolous film or a dumb one. Mostly, it feels like a mistake -- the wrong director matched with the wrong material.
[Schreiber] has managed something of a feat ... in spinning a single charming story out of Foer's yarn ball of a novel, which spanned 200 years, multiple stories and various protagonists.
A movie that wraps a story of mass murder in a package of whimsy, and prefers to focus on our commonality rather than any collective complicity in the crimes of history.
Yes, we laugh; yes, we cry; the sun rises and sets. It's all quite enlightening.
The lamentable influence of Dave Eggers' oh-so-precious post modern literary devices from "A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius" (2000) are glued all over a bullet proof piece of magical realism...
What begins in quirks and idiosyncrasy moves into a dark place where profound sadness and profound closure co-exist side by side.
while the film, concerned as it is with the brotherhood of man, is undoubtedly humanist in its philosophy, there are enough shades of grey to cast long shadows over its apparently sunny outlook.
It is a film that doesn't want us to forget. Or perhaps it is a film that wants a new generation to remember a past which profoundly shapes its present.
The movie is thematically meaningful, sweet, moving, humorous, and lovingly crafted. Yet it left me wondering if it was really worth my time.
...for all its importance as a message picture and for all the subtlety of its filmmaking, the movie never quite feels like it has as much to say as it thinks it does.
First-time director Liev Schreiber proves himself up to the task of conveying comedy and drama with equal aplomb.
It's risky material for a first-time director... But Schreiber's involving screenplay and his remarkably assured handling of the material somehow brings it all together into an effective, charmingly offbeat whole.
Una Vida Iluminada ya es suficiente carta de presentación como para esperar más del Liev Schreiber director que del actor.
...a thoroughly enjoyable, not entirely predictable sentimental comedy/drama...
Broad ethnic humor and mawkish sentiment supposedly held together by Woods' blank expression and very meaningful fades to white.
July 4, 2007Super Reviewer
I resisted seeing this before reading the novel on which it's based, but I finally caved when it was on IFC... so glad I did. In the early going, director Liev Schreiber lets the camera and the music do most of the narrating before the perspective shifts to that of Ukrainian guide, Alex. It's unclear exactly whose
November 19, 2011Super Reviewer
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