Fugitive Pieces (2007)
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Reviews Counted: 74
Fresh: 51 | Rotten: 23
Though the retelling is a bit too subtle, the moving story and solid performances lift Fugitive Pieces beyond standard holocaust tales.
Average Rating: 6.8/10
Critic Reviews: 25
Fresh: 18 | Rotten: 7
Though the retelling is a bit too subtle, the moving story and solid performances lift Fugitive Pieces beyond standard holocaust tales.
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Average Rating: 3/5
User Ratings: 33,289
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Movie Info
Author Anne Michaels's poetic novel comes to the screen courtesy of director Jeremy Podeswa in this period drama concerning a Holocaust survivor who remains eternally haunted by the uncertain fate of his beloved sister. Athos (Rade Sherbedgia) is an archeologist conducting a dig in Nazi-occupied Poland. When Athos discovers a seven-year-old boy named Jakob (Robbie Kay) hiding near the work site, he smuggles the frightened boy back to Greece and promises to shelter him when the Nazis come
Cast
-
Stephen Dillane
Jakob -
Rade Sherbedgia
Athos -
Rosamund Pike
Alex -
Ayelet Zurer
Michaela -
Robbie Kay
Jakob (Young) -
Ed Stoppard
Ben -
Rachelle Lefevre
Naomi -
Nina Dobrev
Bella -
Themis Bazaka
Mrs. Serenou -
Diego Matamoros
Jozef -
Sarah Orenstein
Sara -
Larissa Laskin
Irena -
Daniel Kash
Maurice -
Yorgos Karamihos
Ioannis -
Danai Skiadi
Allegra
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Fugitive Pieces Trailer & Photos
All Critics (74) | Top Critics (25) | Fresh (51) | Rotten (23) | DVD (1)
One of the most delicate, approachable and rewarding Holocaust movies of recent years.
Top CriticFugitive Pieces delivers its own evocative poetry.
The great Serbian actor Rade Serbedzija gives Fugitive Pieces its heart.
Fugitive Pieces is an often lovely work, haunting its viewer long afterward with its quiet observations on what remains with us.
Tasteful, unremarkable art-house fare, rescued from complete irrelevance by Stephen Dillane's bottled-up performance as a writer scarred by the Holocaust.
Fugitive Pieces is often quiet, lyrical, reflective and underplayed. It doesn't minimize Holocaust suffering--far from it--but it strives, often successfully, to unearth the innate good in people Anne Frank alluded to so eloquently.
Distractingly jumping back and forth in time, the film falters badly in the modern era, yet its tale is still a moving one.
Nostalgic, deeply felt, and refreshingly astute, "Fugitive Pieces" is something of a rare bird these days%u2014a big-budget, transnational historical drama that actually justifies its scope and subject matter with more than visual opulence.
Podeswa's confusing, commonplace film lumbers along with a painful sincerity.
Plays out with such daunting high-mindedness it makes The Reader look like Transformers.
Fugitive Pieces reduces the Holocaust and its aftermath to a cosy soap opera.
Given the source novel, Podeswa's attempt to adapt Fugitive Pieces is admirable in itself. Yet despite an enthusiastic cast, this fails to transport you in the same way. Tying itself in narrative knots, the end result is stilted.
The movie has little dramatic momentum, and its journey is essentially Jakob's incremental acceptance of his fate. But Dillane and the writer-director Jeremy Podeswa create such a compelling central character that it hardly matters.
His journey towards peace of mind involves lots of lyrical philosophising, which presumably comes straight from the film's source novel, by Anne Michaels, and doesn't lend itself to dramatisation, despite Dillane's typically intelligent performance.
Anne Michael's complex, poetic novel is here adapted into a stolid, somewhat po-faced film, but one that still manages to tease some affecting drama out of its scholarly premise.
Despite a rich premise, the soul-searching of the older Jakob is, at best, curiously colourless; at worst, positively grating.
An intermittently powerful, if not entirely successful, piece.
But while there's life, there's hope, and Jeremy Podeswa's delicate, deliberate adaptation of Anne Michaels' novel follows Jakob's heartrending progress from the darkness to the light.
There are fleeting moments of poignancy and poetry, significantly when the script features narration taken almost directly from the novel, but this is clunkily written and poorly edited.
Jeremy Podeswa's tremulous adaptation of Anne Michaels's novel aches with earnest intent and tasteful eroticism, yet it moves as heavily and lugubriously as a prison gate.
Restrained, worthy and dull.
Engaging, well acted and ultimately moving drama.
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