Winter Solstice (2005)
Runtime: 90 mins
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Anthony LaPaglia, Aaron Stanford, Mark Webber, Allison Janney
Buy It On DVD
Reviews
Audiences may not get too excited about devastated people who conduct their social lives at the local Dairy Queen.
Winter Solstice is an intense drama and all the action is internal. LaPaglia is such a fine actor and every nuance of his bottled up Jim comes through, as he struggles to not only be a good father, but to find a direction in his own life.
Winter Solstice thrives solely on how much understatement you can actually handle in a movie.
Something that's increasingly rare: a stringently subtextual drama....when they finally arrive, the epiphanies are small ones.
Solstice offers solace. It is quiet, understated and powerful as a single chapter in several changing lives.
Sternfeld started with well-conceived characters and simply didn't succeed in making them flesh. These people have traits instead of personalities; goals instead of dreams.
Ultimately undercut by its fictional elements and its flat characters.
To read between the lines in Winter Solstice, you better bring a magnifying glass.
Such a low-key drama that I'm not sure anything happens in it at all.
This movie deserves to be seen -- and learned from. It captures the moments in which each of us stares out across an emptiness, searching for a connection that will keep us from falling.
Give Winter Solstice some credit for taking an unexpected route.
Scene after scene of halting conversations, meaningful glances and awkward pauses that will leave you as cold as the ominous title implies.
A slice-of-life film that, while well-acted, isn't compelling enough to rise to a tale to which you'd want to give two hours of your undivided attention.
It's the kind of narrow-gauged drama that either will drive you crazy or absorb you in its low-key rhythms. Mostly, I went along for the ride.
The filmmaker understands that quiet desperation is often more moving than noisy suffering.


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