Miral 2010

Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies: ...is [Schnabel] being this indulgent because he can't fully engage the noncommittal material, or are we just noticing the indulgences more because the material's so noncommittal? Read more

A.O. Scott, New York Times: Like so many other well-intentioned movies about politically contentious issues, it is hobbled by its own sincerity and undone by a confused aesthetic agenda. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: When Tom Waits starts croaking on the soundtrack, hipster exhaustion becomes crippling. Read more

John Anderson, Wall Street Journal: The last thing propaganda should do is make its audience work. "Miral" is a lot of work. Read more

Sam Adams, AV Club: Schnabel seems cowed by his subject matter, and it doesn't help that Jebreal adapted her own book. There's no one to impose a shape on the film... Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: It's a miniseries awkwardly stuffed in the body of a two-hour drama about the Palestinians' long struggle against the Israelis. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Miral has the pedigree, the attitude, the weighty subject matter. It's just not much of a movie. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: At once open-eyed and myopic, skillful and meandering... Read more

Christy Lemire, Associated Press: Schnabel's attempt at depicting this longtime, bloody friction from the Palestinian point of view -- and with a conciliatory tone -- is admirable; if only it had been more compelling. Read more

Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter: A political film with a message of hope, on the obvious side. Read more

Sheri Linden, Los Angeles Times: The lack of a compelling lead figure, combined with Schnabel's tentative approach to the material, casts the film's later stretches in the balmy glow of soap opera. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: How can you appeal to both sides when you tell only one side's story? Read more

Mark Jenkins, NPR: Miral plays like an art project that took a wrong turn somewhere between Soho and Ramallah. It seems the Middle East is unstable ground not just for diplomats, but for aesthetes as well. Read more

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: The film seeks to humanize a seemingly unwinnable conflict, and it succeeds at that. But stepping back sadly weakens its story as well as its politics. Read more

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Combining narrative heavy-handedness with an airy disdain for the details of the situation, director Julian Schnabel gives us a one-sided view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in "Miral." Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: "Miral's" agenda doesn't play to Schnabel's strengths. His best work on film is bold-stroke portraiture, evoking complicated personalities and emotions with dynamic, dreamlike imagery. Read more

Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: The director injects some showy images into the mix but, without a defined frame for Schnabel to paint in, "Miral" is an unholy mess. Read more

Dave Calhoun, Time Out: There's an appropriate, dreamlike quality to the imagery, but 'Miral' doesn't have the vital, searing sense of autobiography that it should. Read more

Claudia Puig, USA Today: The film aspires to be epic, spanning 1947 to 1994, but the stories don't always cohere. Read more

Justin Chang, Variety: Schnabel's signature blend of splintered storytelling and sobering humanism feels misapplied to this sweeping multigenerational saga of four Arab women living under Israeli occupation. Read more

Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice: Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style. Read more

Sean O'Connell, Washington Post: What "Miral" lacks in performance art, Schnabel attempts to replace with design. Read more