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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
This film need not be approached with dread or trepidation; life, as witnessed by this small group of flawed but always empathetic characters, is a messy, ugly, and unfair business, but sometimes still surprisingly wonderful.
Bristling with emotional intensity, this is far superior to earlier AIDS-related dramas such as the platitudinous Philadelphia.
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Well-served by a varied cast.
In Techine's nuance-sensitive Aids drama, the characters feel as real as they are multi-faceted - but they are rarely engaging.
The Witnesses doesn't pay off with a great operatic pinnacle, but it's better that way. Better to show people we care about facing facts they care desperately about, without the consolation of plot mechanics.
Top CriticTechine’s graceful, forceful drama has the tact not to play narrative games with its subject.
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.
André Téchiné is a master at taking life experiences and stripping them of sentimentality, leaving us with only the bare-bones honesty of relationships and desire.
Never polemical, frequently philosophical, occasionally saturnine, and beautifully filmed and acted, this film is a minor masterpiece, and one of the best films about AIDS to date.
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.
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.
Téchiné captures the changing attitudes of the times but some characters feel too peripheral.
A somber look back, and for Americans, a view from somewhere else of a time that might have been just recently forgotten.
What the characters in The Witnesses -- and the audience -- pay testimony to in André Téchiné's urgent, compassionate, and ultimately optimistic French drama are the toll the epidemic has rung, and the responsibility of the living to choose life.
Top CriticTéchiné 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).
The film rejects the stereotypes that frequently dog gay characters, allowing them to flourish, although the female protagonists feel less fleshed out
The wealth of emotions and relationship tensions explored here are beautifully calibrated in the knowing hands of Téchiné, a true cinematic humanist.
Best when it turns from bed-hopping into a docudrama, but its effort to personalize the AIDS crisis is not emotionally convincing as the characters lose their individuality.
little more than a cursory glance at a particularly eventful period in history, one that deserves art of a more thoughtful nature.
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. 
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