Harrison's Flowers Reviews

The scenes of carnage are so well-staged and convincing that they make the movie's story even harder to believe.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Traveling in Yugoslavia doesn't open MacDowell's well-rested eyes one bit, and the movie's interest in the problems of Yugoslavia is just lip service.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

It's part travelogue in Hell, part ineffectual weepie.

| Original Score: 1.5/5

Visceral, unrelenting, affecting and, as often, exasperating.

Full Review

It's clearly a slavish imitation of The Killing Fields, but characters are uninvolving and the story far-fetched (even the title is ridiculous).

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Like Black Hawk Down, Harrison's Flowers left me with mixed feelings. Will people want to experience the horrors of war without interesting characters?

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Lacking gravitas, MacDowell is a placeholder for grief, and ergo this sloppy drama is an empty vessel. Leave these Flowers unpicked -- they're dead on the vine.

Full Review | Original Score: D

Every moving performance or brain-searing battle scene is counteracted by...contrivances, narrative blunders & continuity gaffes...too obtrusive to ignore.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

...overly melodramatic...

Full Review | Original Score: C

MacDowell and Brody give emotionally galvanizing performances, but too often Flowers arranges itself on a bier that goes flat.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

A stupefying mix of action, politics and melodrama that is as vaguely condescending as the inept but well-meaning pictures about apartheid from the 1980's.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5

It's basically a not entirely believable soap opera that would not be out of place on Lifetime if some of the violence were toned down.

| Original Score: 2/4

Ends up wilting in the cold light of recent and real heroism, which may not be this photogenic but has the advantage of being incredible and true.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Director Elie Chouraqui, who co-wrote the script, catches the chaotic horror of war, but why bother if you're going to subjugate truth to the tear-jerking demands of soap opera?

| Original Score: 2/5

The movie too often works against itself, pitting an increasingly implausible story with Chouraqui's hard-core realism.

| Original Score: C+

This is a good movie in spurts, but when it doesn't work, it's at important times.

Full Review | Original Score: 5.5/10

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Utterly predictable and idiotically scripted by writer/director Elie Chouraqui.

Full Review

It's as if the complex backdrop of war could support only the most generic melodrama.

| Original Score: 2/4

Somehow we're meant to buy that this doting mother would shun her kids, travel to one of the most dangerous parts of the world, don fatigues and become G.I. Jane.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4