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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
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Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (8) | Top Critics (2) | Fresh (5) | Rotten (3)
Even with its painful contradictions and discomfitures, it's that current rarity: one for the heart.
Lightning Over Water is chaotic, emotionally and esthetically.
It's a fitting heartfelt tribute to Ray.
A poignant and often painful film in which Wenders and the terminally ill Ray attempt to make a film together in the last days before Ray's death in 1979.
Unquestionably the worst movie of Wim Wenders' career and indeed one of the worst movies ever made...
Wenders adds in some cruddy early-80s video from time to time, and the film is an odd mixture of powerful emotions and rambling nothingness.
It is obviously a sincere homage from a younger director to the older man, but it remains dubious and smacks of exploitation.
"Lightning over Water" is an intriguing documentary/fiction hybrid that begins with a jetlagged Wim Wenders arriving in New York to help his friend and hero Nicholas Ray complete one last film before he succumbs to lung cancer which he is in the painful final stages of. So while those preparations are being made, occasionally a handheld Super 8 camera is used to show the film crew working behind the scenes. While digressive at times, especially one sequence involving rehearsals for a Chekhov play, "Lightning over Water" has some very good thoughts on the subject of mortality and how truly inescapable it is. Not only that but the movie is also concerned with the changes that go along with the passage of time like when Ray and his crew travel to Vassar, now co-ed, to screen one of his old films. Plus, we are also treated to a neat view of bygone New York City, circa 1979.
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