Disappointing.
The Sheltering Sky (1990)
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Reviews Counted:21
Fresh:9
Rotten:12
Average Rating:5.2/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 19 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Port and Kit Moresby (John Malkovich and Debra Winger) are American artists and self-styled "travelers" (as opposed to tourists) exploring Saharan Africa. Their 10-year marriage is strained enough... Port and Kit Moresby (John Malkovich and Debra Winger) are American artists and self-styled "travelers" (as opposed to tourists) exploring Saharan Africa. Their 10-year marriage is strained enough to be threatened by the presence of their boorish companion, Tunner (Campbell Scott), who has designs on Kit. The couple's restlessness, along with a kind of fascination with their own estrangement, keeps them moving further away from civilization and from infidelity. Port grows ill, however, and Kit finds herself alone in the desert, cut off from everything she knows. Director Bernardo Bertolucci and director of photography Vittorio Storaro fabulously capture the forbidding beauty of the Saharan locations, as well as Malkovich's brooding self-assurance and Winger's artless sexuality. The color schemes of red and blue serve the story of lovers who live on different emotional planes. Paul Bowles, the expatriate author whose semiautobiographical novel is the basis for the film, comments on the action as a narrator and one-man chorus. He warns Kit, and the viewer, that life is far more finite than one habitually imagines, and that the chance to put things right will not wait forever. [More]
Starring: John Malkovich, Debra Winger, Campbell Scott, Jill Bennett
Starring: John Malkovich, Debra Winger, Campbell Scott, Jill Bennett, Timothy Spall, Eric Vu-An
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
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Reviews for The Sheltering Sky
Brimming with obscure meaning and devoid of drive and fervor, the film dries up in that symbolic desert sun, the victim of its own pretensions and a casualty of trying to film something best suited to the realm of cult literature.
As you'd expect, it's a big, handsome film, rich and strange in psychological depths and eroticism. Malkovich and Winger play woundingly well.
Bertolucci's grand desert epic gets stuck in the sand right at the start.
Soul searching is rarely a thrill a minute but it's rarely as tedious as this. ...Oscar-bait it may be, but "The Sheltering Sky" is more deserving of the First Annual Chicken Little Award.
One of those movies where you know they’re trying to say something important, but it’s just not coming across.
We are brought face-to-face with the compulsions and yearnings which lie behind our alternating love and fear of life.
It is no doubt quite difficult to portray self-indulgence without the work itself taking on an air of arrogance; and certainly The Sheltering Sky fails on that level.
Bowles's gentle, avian features, the obvious wisdom of his years and his distinctive presence are practically worth the price of admission.
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
|---|---|
| 15% 15% | The Ugly Truth |
| 98% 98% | Up |
| 36% 36% | G.I. Joe: The Rise of … |
| 52% 52% | The Taking of Pelham 1… |
| 45% 45% | Ice Age: Dawn of the D… |
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
|---|---|
| 36% 36% | Angels & Demons |
| 68% 68% | Funny People |
| 25% 25% | Four Christmases |
| 45% 45% | Shorts |
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