Fugitive Pieces: Critic Reviews

For a tale spiked with so much torment, Fugitive Pieces feels remarkably soothing.

Anne Michael's complex, poetic novel is here adapted into a stolid, somewhat po-faced film, but one that still manages to tease some affecting drama out of its scholarly premise.

Everyone in the movie...is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images.

Feels less like a redemptive survivor's story and more like a commercial for some terrific Mediterranean resort.

Though much of the film's power is tamped down by the passive storytelling style, Dillane's performance as the adult Jakob is compelling, and Ayelet Zurer is beguiling as Jakob's late-in-life soul mate.

Fugitive Pieces delivers its own evocative poetry.

The resonant film that results is not without its flaws, but it's ultimately quite absorbing.

If Fugitive Pieces has a message, it is that life can heal us, if we allow it.

Fugitive Pieces is often quiet, lyrical, reflective and underplayed. It doesn't minimize Holocaust suffering--far from it--but it strives, often successfully, to unearth the innate good in people Anne Frank alluded to so eloquently.

Tasteful, unremarkable art-house fare, rescued from complete irrelevance by Stephen Dillane's bottled-up performance as a writer scarred by the Holocaust.

The cast is uniformly attractive and earnest. But the romanticized image of the tortured artist is the stuff of stereotype unless it's leavened with humor, or limned in art. In Fugitive Pieces, neither element appears in sufficient quantity.

Bit by fragmented bit, it all adds up to a one-note portrait of its protagonist. Granted, that one note is a powerful one.

A generally dull and unmemorable adaptation of Anne Michaels' extraordinary prose-poetry novel.

Fugitive Pieces, however well-meaning, is still pretty much an emotionally distanced slog.

Well acted but dramatically unyielding.

The great Serbian actor Rade Serbedzija gives Fugitive Pieces its heart.

Nostalgic, deeply felt, and refreshingly astute, "Fugitive Pieces" is something of a rare bird these days%u2014a big-budget, transnational historical drama that actually justifies its scope and subject matter with more than visual opulence.

The strengths of Fugitive Pieces are its fluidity and subtlety. Emotional repression may be one of the most difficult conditions to portray honestly, and Dillane's performance of Jakob is a study in the art of creating sympathy by not asking for it.

It's a character study in which the lead participant is the least interesting person in the movie. There's something inherently frustrating and unsatisfying about that.

This lyrical drama about memory and survivor's guilt taps a deep reservoir of emotions.

[A] lovely, absorbing adaptation of Anne Michaels' lauded novel.

Podeswa's confusing, commonplace film lumbers along with a painful sincerity.

His journey towards peace of mind involves lots of lyrical philosophising, which presumably comes straight from the film's source novel, by Anne Michaels, and doesn't lend itself to dramatisation, despite Dillane's typically intelligent performance.

Restrained, worthy and dull.

One of the most delicate, approachable and rewarding Holocaust movies of recent years.