It's a clear-eyed style of filmmaking reminiscent of The Decalogue or The Bicycle Thief, movies that adopt a raw, bare-bones aesthetic to capture the difficult morality of everyday life.
Comment
06/03/08
The Son (2003)
88
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:57
Fresh:50
Rotten:7
Average Rating:7.7/10
Consensus: Austere, finely crafted, and compelling.
Runtime: 1 hr 43 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
US Box Office: $0
Synopsis: This intensely focused film from brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (LA PROMESSE, ROSETTA) follows Olivier (Olivier Gourmet), a man in mid-life working as a carpentry instructor in a blue collar... [More]
Starring: Olivier Gourmet, Morgan Marinne, Isabella Soupart
Director: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
Reviews for The Son
There's no music, not much dialogue (and what there is is mundane), a deliberately bland video look, and not much happens.
05/24/06
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01/26/06
No review available.
08/03/05
The Son will dazzle you if you patiently think it through and discuss it. The effort you put into it will determine how much it rewards you in the end.
02/01/05
Actions, not words or feelings, are at the center of The Son, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's challenging, nearly religious parable of humanity, fallenness, and grace.
05/31/04
Simple yet deep. Not for blockbuster fans but amazing in its own way.
05/27/04
The Son proves that [the Dardennes] can take on the concepts of the human desire for revenge and the capacity for forgiveness without becoming precious or overbearing.
05/21/04
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05/19/04
See if you don't find Olivier Gourmet's performance one of the most compelling and natural of the year.
04/29/04
The events are simple. The emotions are hugely complex.
04/24/04
Fails to provide enough tension to draw us into what, at first, seems a properly chilling crime drama.
04/23/04
The Son takes forever to get going. And while that is a deliberate move by the filmmakers, Belgium's Dardenne brothers, it's still a problem.
04/16/04
[The film's] sense of claustrophobia heightens the idea that guides The Son, that past events inextricably tie people, even strangers, together.
04/16/04
...a work of enormous moral and spiritual depth, where sacrifice, forgiveness and redemption are revealed as the natural extensions of the movie's humdrum landscape.
04/07/04
If you have to pick between movies about the spiritual passion of tortured carpenters, make this the one.
04/02/04
The simple but persuasive social drama at some point grabs your attention and never lets go.
03/31/04
This carpentry is art.
10/03/03
Although Olivier never faces a gang of outlaws, he becomes a modern Gary Cooper that stares down his inner demons
10/03/03
A substantial story about how one man handles his personal turmoil.
09/25/03
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