Sweet Land: Critic Reviews

If Terrence Malick could ever banish the wispy art clouds from his brain and give in to the storyteller inside, perhaps he might make a movie as stirring as Sweet Land.

There's a tartness at the center of Sweet Land, Ali Selim's unabashedly sentimental tale of a mail-order bride and the community that eventually comes to accept her.

Here is a nicely photographed, but bland, insipid and weirdly passive-aggressive little film.

As empty and beautiful as the picturesque Minnesota terrain it's so clearly taken with.

A lovely, old-fashioned farm romance quietly doubling as a comment on immigration and American identity.

Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast (John Heard, Ned Beatty, Alan Cumming, Alex Kingston, and Lois Smith) and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity.

Selim's script doesn't hit new territory, but beautiful cinematography takes it just far enough.

As Sweet Land demonstrates, bigotry is vulnerable, and love is universal. Sweet Land is a fervent movie poem to that love -- and to family, land, lost times and old beginnings.

This is an intelligently told story that relies on intriguing characters and enticingly mellow pacing that reflects the story's setting.

As opposed to the bulk of low-budget films, the look here is lush and beautifully crafted; even the make-up is excellent.

A spare yet meaningful script, subtly deep performances and a starkly beautiful landscape combine in Sweet Land to tell a love story that is as much about the land as it is about two people.

Intelligently written, brilliantly cast and thesped story of a German mail order bride in a Norwegian-American community in Minnesota just after WWI never hits a wrong note.

Sweet Land is gorgeously shot and directed without a false note, but its chief virtue is the beautiful and little-known [Elizabeth] Reaser.

Terrific acting, a perfectly captured period setting, and a simple, aching farm courtship, that's all Sweet Land is.

If its drama of German and Norwegian newcomers on the plains of southern Minnesota is modest enough, it's also clearly a labor of love.

A sweet gem.

... a beautifully photographed film ... that celebrates its regional identity.

Exceptionally photographed and remarkably performed by actors Tim Guinee and Elizabeth Reaser, Sweet Land is modest, but demonstrative, eager to detail a love story that sustains for a lifetime.

Our movie of the week - which isn't saying much - arrives in the shape of this atmospheric slice of Americana about an arranged marriage deep in the heart of rural Minnesota.

Sweet Land could have been mawkish and overly sentimental, but Selim has a light touch and the film is intelligent, sensitive and sweet.

At once epic and intimate, Sweet Land offers a stirring account of love and hardship which, aside from a muffed Capra moment towards the end, hardly puts a foot wrong.

Minnesota between the wars is a bone yard for dreams, yet, like Babette's Feast, the film plucks a tiny miracle from stony ground.

Nostalgic, gentle, loving: the elegiac mood set against endless rural space inevitably suggests Malick's Days of Heaven. What next from this considerable talent?