| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2006

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Nevertheless, Everything Is Illuminated has a haunting afterglow, one that neither satisfies nor illuminates, but at least keeps the flame alive.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 22, 2005

It's profound in the way that life is profound in hindsight, its view of the past both fixed in history and mutable in the telling. And it's exquisitely tender.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 8, 2005

This isn't a frivolous film or a dumb one. Mostly, it feels like a mistake -- the wrong director matched with the wrong material.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Oct 2, 2005

[Schreiber] has managed something of a feat ... in spinning a single charming story out of Foer's yarn ball of a novel, which spanned 200 years, multiple stories and various protagonists.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 30, 2005

A movie that wraps a story of mass murder in a package of whimsy, and prefers to focus on our commonality rather than any collective complicity in the crimes of history.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 30, 2005

Yes, we laugh; yes, we cry; the sun rises and sets. It's all quite enlightening.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Sep 30, 2005

Schreiber's streamlined version may be only a sliver of the whole, but it's a thoroughly entertaining and very rewarding piece of a very tasty pie.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 30, 2005

If Jonathan were a character instead of a symbol of American Immigrants Disconnected From Their History, Schreiber's movie might have worked.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 29, 2005

It sounds weird, and it is. It's also very funny, not to mention mesmerizing and, finally, heartbreaking.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 29, 2005

The ultra-serious Jonathan and the laid-back Alex are an ideal odd couple. By switching focus between them, Schreiber can quickly steer the movie to different emotional ground.

| Sep 29, 2005

Slapstick and confrontations and misunderstandings and maybe some redemption, but also grace, breathtaking delicacy, and tenderness.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Sep 25, 2005

Perhaps because it's no longer so much about the language, the movie comes across as slight and somewhat fussy. What distinguished the novel doesn't quite translate to the screen.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 23, 2005

Schreiber's images -- a graveyard of old war machines, a field of sunflowers -- are impressive and help convey the wonderful idea behind Everything Is Illuminated: that no matter who we are or where we live, we are all connected.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 23, 2005

Fans of Jonathan Safran Foer may rightly consider this an act of taxidermy. Everything Is Illuminated hasn't been adapted so much as gutted, stuffed, and mounted.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 23, 2005

Every novel cannot be a movie, and this one should not have been.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 22, 2005

A film that grows in reflection.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 22, 2005

As a whimsical and at times poignant look at family secrets and family ties, it's effective, it's moving.

Full Review | Sep 19, 2005

There isn't enough drama here to sustain an entire film, and Schreiber's direction is relentlessly coy.

| Sep 16, 2005