Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Kodie Bird True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

TxMike My wife and I were able to watch this on Amazon streaming movies. The sound is Dolby so it comes across quite nicely on our home receiver which decoded it into surround sound.The writer is the same one that gave us "Hugo" which is one of my recent favorites. It has a similar atmosphere, elements are introduced but not explained, yet as the story continues things eventually all come together. However this one is complex enough that near the end the boy reads an account of the complete story, aloud, so that the audience clearly understands the whole story.It uses a unique approach, cutting between a deaf girl in 1927, going off alone to New York to look for her mother, and a recently deaf boy in 1977 going off alone to New York to find his father. The 1927 part is in B&W while the 1977 part is in color,the movie switches often between the two and the stories have certain parallels. We sense there is a connection between the two but we are uncertain what, until things come together in the end.Overall a different and nicely entertaining fable, with family values.

guillep2k This story should have been told in no more than 15 minutes. The rest are fillers.

Movie_Muse_Reviews Graceful and quite literally quiet, "Wonderstruck" makes for an unconventional (or at least uncommercial) family film, but one worth enduring thanks to director Todd Haynes, the cast and composer Carter Burwell. Written by Brian Selznick, who authored the book as well as the book that became Martin Scorsese's "Hugo," "Wonderstruck" tells the story of a young boy in 1977 and a young girl in 1927 who take on New York City in search of secrets and a sense of belonging. Ben (Oakes Fegley) is a boy living in Minnesota whose just lost his mother and never knew his father, but has a lead pointing him to NYC; Rose (Millicent Simmonds) is a girl living in New Jersey who is deaf and feels misunderstood by her father in a world unkind to those with disabilities. She takes the ferry across the river to find silent film star Lillian Mayhew (Julianne Moore).Much like "Hugo," Selznick's story is a love letter (in this case to silent film, New York City and museums) wrapped up in a tale of children escaping challenging circumstances in search of answers and finding friendship along the way. The key difference is that "Hugo" is a more focused mystery that moves concretely from A to B to C, etc. Haynes approaches "Wonderstruck" as more of an art piece that glides about, with both storylines slowly yet inevitably intertwining. The "Carol" and "Far From Heaven" director crafts a seamless audio-visual experience that makes a gentle appeal to our own sense of wonder.Consequently, "Wonderstruck" will have trouble captivating audiences; children should definitely see it, but not necessarily children with short attention spans. The effort to play off silent films through the lens of deafness has great artistic and even educational value, but entertainment-wise it leaves something to be desired. As thoughtfully as Haynes switches between timelines and contrasts "hearing" scenes with "non-hearing" scenes to affect our perspective, graceful transitions can only be so riveting.Children will for sure not notice Burwell's score that establishes place, time and wonderment extremely well. He even underscores moments of action, suspense and surprise in the way a silent film score would back in the '20s. These are just some of the artistic touches that make "Wonderstruck" special for adults whose tastes incline them toward films that appreciate history, the arts and other intellectual subjects.One of the most critical artistic touches comes at the end of the film with an entire sequence told using models and dioramas. It also ties together the entire plot, so a lot hinges on it. It is both a beautiful conclusion and somewhat anti-climactic given that the reveals are not all that surprising (at least to an adult viewer). Yet the point is not for any startling revelations, but for the characters to come to terms with the answers they find and embrace the good that came from the journey.~Steven CThanks for reading! Visit Movie Muse Reviews for more

secondtake Wonderstruck (2017) An interesting film for any film buff or historian, partly for how badly it conjurs up the style and format of 1927 cinema. The story has sentimental strengths and a pair of characters (and actors) who create a certain amount of empathy, but even here the progress is as plodding as it is pretty. I've come to think that Todd Haynes is a bit of a hack as a director, riding mostly a willingness to take on projects that are dripping with emotional pitfalls. His most famous film is "Far from Heaven," also starring Julianne Moore, and it combined best a combination of visual richness and personal angst. In that case there was the advantage of a theme of being a closeted gay man in a 1950s America that resonates with so many, one way or another, along with powerful issues of race. Here there are children to relate to: a girl who is deaf in 1927 and a boy who is an orphan in 1977. Brian Selznick (yes, a relative of the famous David O.) wrote the book, and it's set in 1977 because the famous New York City blackout is at the climax. For some reason Haynes has created a world that is gorgeously 1970 or 1972 instead (though it's labelled 1977 by necessity). The colors, the cars, the clothes, the hair, every detail is deliciously wrong. (I'm old enough to know, plus just check out the cars.) And his sense of the neighborhoods on the west side of Central Park is wrong, too. It's all really beautiful, but why? Why? Back to 1927, the year of the first sound picture, we have the deaf girl enjoying silent films-but these are projected on the screen in her theater as widescreen (not the standard 4:3 Academy format)! I know, who cares, right? Well, why the heck not get it right? Haynes mentions in interviews that he watched some old movies to get the feel for them right, which is a confession of incompetance. His own filming of 1927 and the girl's path through the city is naturally any format he chooses and it's very nicely photographed. In fact, the star of the movie is not the strained and obvious story, dragged out for two hours, and it's certainly not the director, but it's the cinematographer, Edward Lachman, who also shot "Far from Heaven" and several other notable films with styles drawing heavily from the past but still keeping a contemporary edge. I was able to watch this entire film partly because it looks so good. I think Haynes has a good technical crew in general, and the movie benefits. Haynes has also mentioned that he wanted this to be a film that children could watch, and he might be right in the sense that it's gentle and absorbing, without violence or adult material. I liked that. But I think a kid would as bored as any adult, and more willing to skip to the end, which is a contrived tearjerking inevitability, ponderous and thick.