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Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Life Before Her Eyes, The
Magnolia Pictures


6.5

based on 25 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 12 votes
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FILM:

House of Sand and Fog

MPAA RATING: R for violent and disturbing content, language and brief drug use

Starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood, and Eva Amurri

The Life Before Her Eyes is an intense and visually evocative drama about the loss of youth, investigating how a single moment in time can define an entire life. Based on Laura Kasischke's visionary novel, the story hinges on a pivotal confrontation: two high school girls held captive by a gunman and forced to make the terrifying choice as to who will live and who will die. The Life Before Her Eyes explores the reverberations stemming from the collision of past and future, reality and dream. Life can end in an instant--yet the echoes of possible futures remain inescapable. Moving backward and forward in time, it combines the dramatic intensity of Sophie's Choice with the eerie mystery of a ghost story like The Others. (Magnolia)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Emil Stern
DIRECTED BY:	Vadim Perelman
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: August 19, 2008 Theatrical: April 18, 2008
RUNNING TIME:	90 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Emotionally sophisticated, humane and worth talking about for hours.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

The fact that I didn't understand a film, that its ending can be interpreted at least two ways and maybe three – all likely to be "true" – usually sends me growling in disgust from the theater. But The Life Before Her Eyes has grown on me in memory.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Of the two timelines, the one featuring the teenage Diana is more involving than the one featuring the adult version. Both lead actresses give fine performances, but Thurman has less material to work with.

Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano

Though atmospheric and occasionally suspenseful, its gimmickry keeps it from being transcendent.

Washington Post Ann Hornaday

Uma Thurman delivers a mesmerizing performance in The Life Before Her Eyes, a film that, once seen and fully digested, exerts the same haunting pull as the shattering events it chronicles.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

The best thing about The Life Before Her Eyes, a somber meditation on fate and friendship, is the way it captures the close relationship between two teenage girls.

The Hollywood Reporter Michael Rechtshaffen

Boasting two terrific performances by Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood as the adult and teenage versions of the same character.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White

The Life Before Her Eyes is like one of those puzzles. There is something wrong in each scene, and the viewer zeroes in on the elements that don't fit, wondering if there is a purpose behind them.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It's sad to see such subtle, wrenchingly emotional work expended on such trifling material.

Chicago Tribune Sid Smith

Beautiful, horrifying, exasperating and just plain weird.

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

Director Vadim Perelman is big on slo-mo lyrical effects and confusing time shifts, making the movie unnecessarily arty and detracting from what could have been a searing psychological study.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

Tidy, predictable, excruciatingly fussy in its details and lacking the tiniest glimmer of humor, The Life Before Her Eyes contradicts the director’s claim in the production notes that the movie “is not a perfectly ordered experience with clear causes and effects.”

Variety John Anderson

A femme-centric drama about the aftermath of a high school massacre, profoundly confusing "In Bloom" arrives at some very tenuous moral conclusions that might alienate much of its supposed target audience.

Village Voice Ella Taylor

Moviegoers may mistake The Life Before Her Eyes for an unduly long L'Oreal commercial featuring softly lit film stars moving languidly with swinging hair through overbearingly premonitory weather.

Premiere Glenn Kenny

While "House of Sand and Fog" remained (somewhat precariously) balanced on the knife-edge that can turn tragedy into bathos, this picture doesn't fare nearly as well, and begins weighing down the viewer with its putative significance only minutes after its opening credits.

Boston Globe Janice Page

When the big twist is revealed at the end of The Life Before Her Eyes, you might think the only way to appreciate its cleverness is to see the film again. I did that. It didn't help.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson

Perelman's follow-up, The Life Before Her Eyes, finds him clumsily trying to outdo M. Night Shyamalan.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Perelman pays such cooing attention to surfaces that our response to violence carries no more importance than our response to the delicate jewelry around the adult Diana's neck.

Chicago Reader J.R. Jones

Perelman never overcomes the disjuncture of having two familiar actresses play the same grown character, and despite the endless crosscutting, the two halves settle respectively into ghoulish foreboding and murky psychological drama.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Perelman eases the transitions between the past and the present with echoing phrases and situations, but they all seem rather pat and contrived. Does he really think that repeated refrains from the Zombies oldie, "She's Not There," won't be a dead (so to speak) giveaway?

New York Post Lou Lumenick

An overwrought and patently offensive anti- abortion drama from the director of the accomplished "House of Sand and Fog."

Portland Oregonian Marc Mohan

Confused, morally queasy, self-important mess.

New York Daily News Joe Neumaier

What this heavy-handed film mainly has to endure is a clunky story structure and an ending that wasn't original when it was seen four decades ago on "The Twilight Zone."

New York Magazine David Edelstein

In a vile-movie competition between Michael Haneke’s "Funny Games" and Vadim Perelman’s The Life Before Her Eyes, Haneke’s film would win--but only because he’s working so much harder to be noxious.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Consider this more a consumer warning than a movie review: The Life Before Her Eyes will draw you in, then intrigue you, then bore you, then bewilder you, then make you crazy with its incessant flashbacks and flash forwards, and finally leave you feeling like the victim of a fraud.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 12 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Enrique gave it a4:
Barely convincing. Uma Thurmann is fine but the script is too contrived. A big disappointment.

Richard . gave it a10:
The critics could not be more wrong. This is the most profound and emotional film of the year so far. It's sad that many people will not see it based on the copycat critics reviews.

Chad S. gave it an8:
When the good girl met the bad girl in Catherine Hardwicke's "Thirteen", the bad girl exerted her will on the good girl, and the good girl became bad. The good girl was played by Evan Rachel Wood. This time, in "The Life Before Her Eyes", she's the bad girl, who meets a good girl, and she becomes a good girl, too. The good girl is played by Eva Amurri. Diana McFee(Uma Thurman) can thank Maureen for the woman she is today. But where is Maureen? The last time we saw her, she was in a high school girls' bathroom with her best friend and the gunman. Since "The Life Before Her Eyes" predicates itself as a sort of "Donnie Darko" for women, Maureen's fate isn't wholly determinisitic, because the past is present, the past is fluid, as Diana rewrites her history, her husband and child's history, and especially, Maureen's history from a contemporary epoch(the weeks leading up to the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre) that runs parallel to the past. Like Alejandro Agresti's "The Lake House", this "My So-Called Elephant" is sci-fi for women who don't like sci-fi.

Bryn hotness gave it a10:
I thought this movie was phenomenal and i watched some of this movie was shot on the street right next to mine and i think all fo the actors and actresses did a teriffic job!!!!!!!!

Paul B. gave it a2:
Uma Thurman continues her losing streak in a poorly-constructed script punctuated with ridiculous lines such as, "I don't know about you but I could use some soup!"

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Life Before Her Eyes, The Magnolia Pictures

Life Before Her Eyes, The
Magnolia Pictures