As in real life, often the main crisis morphs into a continuance that has no slam-bang conclusion. Rather, we just see a small hope that awakes to experience another sunrise.
Comment
05/19/08
The Witnesses (2008)
84
%
Tomatometer
How does the Tomatometer work 
Reviews Counted:45
Fresh:38
Rotten:7
Average Rating:7/10
Consensus: French director André Téchiné successfully weaves five gripping stories in an engaging and realistic film about the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
Theatrical Release:2007
Synopsis: Legendary French film director André Téchiné goes back to 1980s Paris in the tender, heartbreaking THE WITNESSES. Emmanuelle Beart (8 WOMEN) stars as Sarah, a children's book author who has just... [More]
Starring: Michel Blanc, Emmanuelle Beart, Sami Bouajila, Julie Depardieu
Director: André Téchiné
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Reviews for The Witnesses
The film rejects the stereotypes that frequently dog gay characters, allowing them to flourish, although the female protagonists feel less fleshed out
12/07/07
André Téchiné’s The Witnesses (Les Témoins) treats the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, first in the United States and then spreading to the rest of the world in 1984, as a devastating medical atrocity in a war that is still raging.
01/23/08
Top CriticIt is a huge credit to the actors that we end up caring about these deeply flawed individuals.
02/14/08
In Techine's nuance-sensitive Aids drama, the characters feel as real as they are multi-faceted - but they are rarely engaging.
10/12/07
The Witnesses is a period-piece but feels utterly contemporary through its characters’ urgent, overlapping imperatives.
01/30/08
Andre Techine is a master at taking life experiences and stripping them of sentimentality, leaving us with only the bare-bones honesty of relationships and desire.
03/03/08
A moral tale that isn't saddled with moralism, The Witnesses is a novelistic film in the best sense.
01/29/08
Téchiné proves he remains one of the foremost chroniclers of French life and human relationships in general with his haunting new drama Les Témoins (The Witnesses).
07/11/07
An ambling narrative, but an atmospheric one that feels authentic despite its unlikely character pairings.
02/15/08
Top CriticIt becomes a movie about figuring out how to live a full life, and The Witnesses is necessarily a bittersweet one, since so many people who came of age in the '80s never had a chance.
03/14/08
Director Andre Techine's story is one of subtle emotional tones that require the most of an actor, and the cast is uniformly compelling.
03/13/08
Téchiné films Johan Libéreau, who plays Manu, the fresh-faced young boy coming of age in The Witnesses, with the sort of discretion that gives mystery and dignity to human beauty.
11/25/08
Excitingly convoluted.
10/18/08
Top CriticThe wealth of emotions and relationship tensions explored here are beautifully calibrated in the knowing hands of Téchiné, a true cinematic humanist.
01/29/08
A fast-moving, engrossing multiple-character drama that brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s into laser focus.
07/14/07
With a critical yet compassionate perspective, the great French helmer Techine captures vividly the end of an era--sexual freedom and beginning of AIDS--and its zeitgeist through a touching tale of friends and lovers defying conventional mores.
01/29/08
André Techiné's The Witnesses is one of the finest fiction-film accounts of a free yet frightful moment in time, when the relaxing sexual liberties of the previous decade were being squeezed by the onset of an unforgiving new virus.
01/31/08
Top CriticThis movie is more concerned with ideas of life and hope. Once we realize that this has been Téchiné's theme all along -- and not just another disease-of-the-week film -- then all the mood changes and banalities begin to come into focus.
01/24/08
In The Witnesses, [director] Techine levels his gaze on the '80s, an era of seeming innocence, perhaps license, and one in which biological freedom has led to a loose, even sloppily knit fabric of humanity.
03/13/08
Top CriticLatest News for The Witnesses
January 31, 2008:
Critics Consensus: Over Her Dead Body is DOA, Guess The Eye's & Strange Wilderness' Tomatometer!
This week at the movies, we've got creepy visions (The Eye, starring Jessica Alba), haunted romances (Over Her Dead Body, starring Paul Rudd and Eva Longoria Parker), woodland... More...
January 10, 2008:
Lots of gab, a little flesh flashing, more gab, and not much action or momentum. French Kissing, Brokeback Mountain style. 
More...
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