House of Sand and Fog Reviews

I am scared of Ben Kingsley. And for that matter, Jennifer Connelly.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material.

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Sir Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly provide memorable performances, but this morose film is far too boring and depressing to recommend.

Full Review | Original Score: C

Creepy and unpleasant, this movie makes you feel like you need to take a shower after watching it -- or just simply want to kill yourself.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

The audience laughed at the improbability of the story. This is a bad sign.

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A lack of empathetic characters cripples this poorly paced but well acted drama about an Iranian family who purchase a city-auctioned bungalow in Northern California after its former tenant has been unjustly evicted.

Full Review | Original Score: C

Underneath all the wild gesticulating is nothing: no suspense, no characters, no emotional truth, nothing.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

Reveals the deep, dark meaning of a botched real estate transaction.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Kingsley's astonishing performance is wasted in this otherwise overlong, overwrought, and overcooked mess-o-drama.

Full Review | Original Score: C

Since the film fails to communicate the necessary level of interior insight, it's like spending two hours with people you'd just as soon never have met.

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Is there anything that makes you want to scream more than a film that's this full of its own gravity and import?

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It's a film...absent of easy black-or-white ethics, which makes for some powerful emotions. But it's also a film with nagging problems that add up to a distracting crescendo.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

There was nothing left to think about after all the dust cleared, just another movie that got eaten up in the Bay Area fog.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Turning into a twisted pretzel, House of Sand and Fog becomes a melodrama straining to make its point.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.25/5

The dramatic scheme is to show how two people ... intersect "tragically," but what we see is a group of characters who act as wrongheadedly and intransigently as imaginable.

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For all its histrionics, the movie never earns your sorrow.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

House of Sand and Fog doesn't deliver on the gut level of contest, and neither does it offer any other terms in which it does deliver for the audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Lack of sympathy for the beautiful but flaky heroine undermines the dramatic framework of "House" like a swarm of hungry termites.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Is House anti-American? Possibly.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

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