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Summary: Wow! A movie to blow you away.
Review: One of the few films in my lifetime I deemed worthy enough to attend repeatedly when it was at the theaters.
However the story is not filmed in a linear fashion making it initially hard to follow, in particular during first viewing. The film should come with a one or two paragraph synophsis, which I believe would go a long way towards helping the viewer follow the story. Nonetheless, the images and characterizations and music will leave you breathless. Simply put, one of the greatest films of all time -- and one of the most rewarding.
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Summary: I must refute the last review
Review: The only reason I am submitting a review is because of the horrible misinformation put forth by the previous reviewer from the neighboring state of Conn. The Sweet Hereafter is a remarkably original movie that requires patience and it never insults your intelligence. The trick is that you need some degree of intellect in order to process what Atom Egoyan is trying to accomplish. I realize that people should be free to express their opinions, but my dad always told me that opinions should be at the very least based on reality. Buy/rent this DVD/Video, and let the emotional chips fall where they may...
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Summary: THE 'HEREAFTER' HAD BETTER BE SWEET, TO MAKE UP FOR THIS...
Review: This is an astonishingly disappointing film. The 'hereafter' had better be particularly sweet if you've had to sit through this inordinately pretentious and endless film. Good casting, but impossibly, Ian Holm delivers a genuinely lousy performance - mucking his way through this endless contrivance with accents ranging from Bronx taxi driver, to Jewish deli owner, to South African gem dealer - he's totally lost here and, clearly, making alimony payments by appearing in this ridiculous movie. I suspect the original book is far better. A terrible and arrogant script. Avoid this at all cost.....
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Summary: incredible
Review: The best novel turned into a movie maybe even better......
Sarah Polley's finest work!!
This is the story of one morning when a school bus as an accident and takes the lives of most of the kids on the bus....Sarah Polley's character is one of the survivors....now she must remain in a wheel chair all of her life....
An attorney comes up to investigate what happened and who's to blame and listens to the towns reaction to the accident and tries to help them in their grieving process but while finding out about the town and its people, he also discovers a lot of the locals hidden secrets, which begins him thinking of his own painful past.... This is by far a light-hearted movie...it's very sad and emotional and begins to tell and teach about the issues of blame and closure in our lives....
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Summary: This movie far surpasses the book
Review: Director Atom Egoyan put together an artistic masterpiece. The film is superbly cast, mainly with talented but unknown actors (Ian Holm is the one big name). The settings and photography carry this film as much as the actors. This is one of those artsy films where every glance and facial expression in every scene counts. The film is an adaptation of Russell Banks's novel of the same name. Egoyan has taken alot of artistic license and the film is better off for it. Both the book and the film tell the story of a town's collective grief arising from a tragic school bus accident which killed 14 children and maimed another.The book tells the story through five narrations by four main characters. The film focuses on one main character, Mitchell Stephens, the personal injury attorney barely enduring his own grief and regret, who comes to the town to court clients for a multi-million dollar class action suit. The film is difficult to follow with one viewing due to the rapid shifting of scenes and timeframes. The film adds two recurring, very powerful scenes which are not in the novel. The first is an encounter on an airplane between Mitchell Stephens and a childhood friend of Stephens' drug-addicted daughter which explains much of Stehens's pain, frustration and drive. The second is repeated shots of the survivor of the bus accident, the wheelchair-bound Nichole, with voiced-over readings of Robert Browning's Pied Piper of Hamlin. The expressionless reading of the poem conveys Nichole's sense of isolation and regret at having survived in a way no amount of dialog could. The poem's several themes line up with the movie's themes exactly. It adds dimension and heartbreaking beauty to this film. The book's final chapter is entirely missing from the film. Once again, I think the film is better for the omission.<
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Summary: Kudos to the Cast and Crew of Hereafter
Review: I am speechless when it comes to this movie. It is quite possibly one of the finest acted pieces of work I have ever seen. All of the actors in this movie deserved academy awards nominations, but the woman who played the busdriver was perfect. These roles were so amazingly difficult, and so deftly executed. It seems impossible that the majority of this superior cast was "unknown". Although I could never see this movie again, this is an important film and a must see for all film students and actors. These guys got it right.
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Summary: A Classic
Review: This movie is great at setting a mood and its transitions among three different time lines are smooth and masterful. All the performances are outstanding. This is a sad and beautifully shot movie but this movie is not necessarily depressing. It is too rich and complex in character to be experienced as merely hopeless. Grief is explored under a moral dilemma that involves an entire community who harbor a few secrets from one another. We know more about the community than the lawyer who comes into their lives with an agenda. I loved the way it used the tale of the Pied Piper to drive home its theme of punishment and retribution. What can you do when there is no one to punish for your pain and loss? That is the main theme of this movie. Watch it and decide who was wrong and who was right in their motivations. Better yet, try to understand the nature of their motivations. This is a great blend of music, photography, storytelling, and complex psychological and moral situations. This movie tops Exotica and that movie was a gem too.
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Summary: What could have been the best movie ever or is it
Review: This is what Fargo tried to be. Fargo was a great film, and this far surpassed it. The actors were uniquely picked (Like the two from television's La Femme Nikita) with great detail to the characters written. The cinematography was unreal also. The film could not have been better unless it was about a hour long, with more emphasis on the Lawyer's daughter. The scene explaining the "Black Widow Spiders" was fantastic. Watch this movie only when you are fully prepared to experience greatness. Films like these do not come along that often. Hollywood keep your ears open, HEADOPERATIONS is hollaring give me more.
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Summary: An Absoulutely Fabulous "Hereafter"
Review: Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" belongs on the list as one of the ten best movies of the 1990s. It is a movie in which the plot, a lawyer attempts to make a big civil case out of a tragic school bus accident, is almost incidental. What matters are the performances, the mood and the spellbinding out of sequence storytelling. Ian Holm and Sara Polley lead a uniformly excellent cast. Both are haunted by secret tragedies in their lives that show on their faces more than in their words. Polley survived the crash, but is paralized and doted upon by the guilt ridden father who had committed incest with her before the accident. Holm is a man tortured by a manipulative and drug addled daughter who knows how to exploit his emotions to her own ends. In between, is the sad small Canadian town that lost most of its children to the accident. All of this sounds bleakly depressing, and yet curiously it is not because of the way the beautiful way the movie is filmed and sequenced. The use of the "Pied Piper" story as a literary subtext is the kind of unique touch that gives the film its power. Had Hollywood any imagination, "The Sweet Hereafter" would have swept the Oscars the year it was released. It is quite simply that good. It is a movie that can be enjoyed by both film buffs and anyone who like to be challenged rather than merely entertained.
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Summary: THE BEST FILM OF THE 90'S, NO ARGUMENT
Review: "The Sweet Hereafter," a miraculous adaptation of an oddly structured but brilliant book by Russel Banks, is one of the most lovely, unforgettable movies of the 90's. Egoyan incorporates the music of the Tragically Hip (performed both by them, and hauntingly by the film's star Sarah Polley), barren winter imagery, deeply layered characters, and a non-linear story line all to great effect. Probably the most effective scenes in the movie are the times when the landscape is still and the characters just sit. There is the haunting feedback of a discarded guitar, the silent play between Ian Holm and Sarah Polley in their few scenes together, the moment in which the doomed school bus at the story's center hovers tenuously on the ice...Everything has the effect of passing the viewer into a world at once bleak and hopeful, beautiful and disturbing. The ideas behind the film go deeper than just grief and loss, often so deep that they cannot be fully articulated even far down in the viewers soul. It just sits there like a weight on the heart for weeks after viewing and never lets the viewer escape its haunting grip. Sarah Polley and Ian Holm give standout performances, Atom Egoyan confirms the genious sugested at in "Exotica," and the score is a must-have for any music fan. I couldn't recommend the film any more strongly. It is the best film of the 90's.
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