Based-on-a-true-tale drama about an insane asylum on the frontlines in the Chechen conflict is tired, trite and dull.
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05/22/03
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House of Fools (2003)
38
%
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Reviews Counted:47
Fresh:18
Rotten:29
Average Rating:5/10
Theatrical Release:Apr 25, 2003 Limited
Synopsis: In House Of Fools, a beautiful young Chechen woman, Janna (Julia Vysotsky) is one of several inmates living in a psychiatric hospital. Insulated from the world, the inmates are oblivious to the war... [More]
Starring: Julia Vysotsky, A. Kalyagin, Sultan Islamov, Evgeni Mironov
Director: Andrei Konchalovsky
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Reviews for House of Fools
With its cast of nauseatingly lovable lunatics, House of Fools may make you feel like you've been tricked into suffering through the Kevin Spacey flick K-Pax with subtitles.
05/22/03
Top CriticRuined from the start by its insulting depiction of mental illness.
05/16/03
Top CriticThe misery I suffered in the Russian horror House of Fools, directed by the ridiculously overrated Andrei Konchalovsky, does deserve special scorn, but I don't have the stomach to rehash it.
05/16/03
Top CriticA kindly film with a generous heart beaming through the discordant rumblings of useless wars.
05/16/03
Top CriticA film that succeeds not by arguing that the world is crazier than the asylum, but by arriving at the melancholy possibility that both are equally insane.
05/16/03
Top CriticA humane and fantastic work, and it touches us precisely because Konchalovsky shows the reality of both the soldiers and the madhouse inmates.
05/15/03
Top CriticHouse of Fools was Russia's official entry for this year's Academy Awards, and if this is the best they can do, their worst must be horrifyingly bad.
05/07/03
Very uneasily combines [Konchalovsky's] gritty sense of atmosphere with a more, shall we say, westernized sense of empowerment.
05/06/03
Embarrassingly fatuous and pretentious.
05/02/03
Top CriticYou know the song. It's the one with the chorus that goes: 'Have you ever really, really, really ever loved a woman?' I mean, really.
05/02/03
Top CriticSo scattered that it fails to emotionally engage the viewer.
05/02/03
Perhaps, it's a labour of love; certainly, too often, it's a love that turns laboured.
05/02/03
I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.
05/02/03
Top CriticThe more sharply realized a dramatic moment, the more painfully fake.
05/01/03
Top CriticA sort of King of Hearts meets No Man’s Land. Gracefully told, but suffers from translation.
04/28/03
Once again pressed into the service of allegory, serious mental illness is relegated to harmless twitches and quirks borne by an entertaining cast of eccentrics endowed with a unique wisdom all their own.
04/25/03
A well-intentioned but agonizingly uneven exercise that finds director Andrei Konchalovsky more eager than ever to take risks, but somehow unable to make them pay off.
04/25/03
While this film offers engaging moments, the overall impact is too blurred and lost along the way.
04/25/03
Only adds to the sense that Mr. Konchalovsky has lost his artistic moorings. He has certainly lost his common sense.
04/25/03
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