Fugitive Pieces is all about glorifying a state of humorless suspension, where you dwell stoically in the past until, suddenly, you are rescued by a demure, unchallenging version of romantic love. It's depressing.

| Aug 21, 2017

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

| Original Score: B | Sep 3, 2011

Distractingly jumping back and forth in time, the film falters badly in the modern era, yet its tale is still a moving one.

| Jul 29, 2011

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.

| Aug 8, 2009

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

| Jun 2, 2009

Plays out with such daunting high-mindedness it makes The Reader look like Transformers.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 29, 2009

Fugitive Pieces reduces the Holocaust and its aftermath to a cosy soap opera.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2009

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

| Original Score: 4/6 | May 29, 2009

Given the source novel, Podeswa's attempt to adapt Fugitive Pieces is admirable in itself. Yet despite an enthusiastic cast, this fails to transport you in the same way. Tying itself in narrative knots, the end result is stilted.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2009

The movie has little dramatic momentum, and its journey is essentially Jakob's incremental acceptance of his fate. But Dillane and the writer-director Jeremy Podeswa create such a compelling central character that it hardly matters.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 29, 2009

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2009

Despite a rich premise, the soul-searching of the older Jakob is, at best, curiously colourless; at worst, positively grating.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 29, 2009

An intermittently powerful, if not entirely successful, piece.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2009

But while there's life, there's hope, and Jeremy Podeswa's delicate, deliberate adaptation of Anne Michaels' novel follows Jakob's heartrending progress from the darkness to the light.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 29, 2009

There are fleeting moments of poignancy and poetry, significantly when the script features narration taken almost directly from the novel, but this is clunkily written and poorly edited.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 29, 2009

Jeremy Podeswa's tremulous adaptation of Anne Michaels's novel aches with earnest intent and tasteful eroticism, yet it moves as heavily and lugubriously as a prison gate.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 29, 2009

Restrained, worthy and dull.

| May 29, 2009

A slow-moving, fitfully atmospheric drama.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2009