92% Amour

All Critics (96) | Top Critics (22) | Fresh (88) | Rotten (8)

Haneke ("Funny Games," "Cache," "The Piano Teacher," "White Ribbon") has tackled a difficult subject that is unpleasant to watch, more unpleasant to think about. But the 70 year-old filmmaker has done it with taste, discretion and sympathy.

Amour might seem hardly the stuff of entertainment, yet the reason it has been acclaimed isn't mysterious. Confronting death, it studies life, closely and lovingly.

Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.

A compassionate, rigorously unsentimental masterwork from a director who doesn't normally truck in emotions like the one named in the title.

This is an unforgettable love story set at the close of day, as tragic and beautiful in its way as "Tristan und Isolde," and a portrait of the impossible beauty and fragility of life that will yield new experiences to every viewer and every viewing.

An examination of life and death, this minimalist film succeeds on all levels.

On paper it's a welcome change of pace for Haneke, but his tendency to treat the couple as patients rather than characters -- at a cold remove rather than with a warm embrace -- feels at odds with the material.

The film's power stems from the way Haneke avoids milking the viewer's sympathy.

Amour is just as likely to put someone to sleep as it is to win high-brow praise.

Intimate, admirable and elegant, it's, nevertheless, demanding, deliberate and depressing - about facing our own mortality.

A film so honest in dealing with end-of-life issues that its purity is a positive rebuke to all the maudlin movies on the subject.

Gains its power from grounding its characters' pain in something humanistic.

Profoundly moving, unflinchingly honest and tender with brave, emotionally raw performances by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva.

Mundanely horrifying and extremely powerful.

The story behind the central tableau ... starts off completely mundane, shifts into a tale of pain and sadness, and ends on a note of horror mixed with tortured understanding.

If Haneke has any real interest in keeping art cinema alive, he should take some notes from the Queensbridge rapper Nas.

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/771307454/

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