Its minutiae don't bring a lump in the throat -- just a drumming of the fingers.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 29, 2007

The film is touching, imaginative and makes the best of its cash through a minimalist skill that shows Crialese to be a genuinely original director.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 29, 2007

The details of this chaotic odyssey to the New World are so intricately and poignantly handled that throughout a voice in your head insists: this is how it must have been.

| Jun 29, 2007

Except during the pointed and crisply staged scenes of testing and quarantine, his movie feels thoroughly adrift.

| Jun 29, 2007

His excellent new film gives us the fierceness without the syrup: a solidly constructed film with a brilliant visual sense, tremendous performances and an eloquent, dreamy sense of time and place. It held me in every frame.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 29, 2007

Gorgeous to look at, unfashionably optimistic and quirkily seductive, this is a robust joy of a movie. It's certainly one of my favourite releases of the year so far.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 29, 2007

The rhythms of the movie are slow and daydreamy, but [director] Crialese delights in breaking up the realism with his protagonist's mystical -- almost madcap -- visions of the New World's abbondanza.

| Jun 29, 2007

Tedious and bland - entry denied!

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 29, 2007

The film never really coheres, and although some scenes are amazing, the total is slow, ponderous and sometimes silly.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 28, 2007

[Director] Crialese ends his film on an exquisite note of fantasy: an indelible image of hope and good fortune. His vision is unique; his film, strange and lovely.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 27, 2007

Director Emanuele Crialese passes no judgments, capturing the mundane and miraculous alike.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 22, 2007

Turns an old story into something completely new.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 22, 2007

Despite the hardships depicted, Golden Door is a sweet film at heart, playing witness to the birth pangs of modern America with both due respect and the occasional comic grace note, but not, oddly, one single shot of the Statue of Liberty.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 22, 2007

I've got to be honest here. In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that I was not entirely awake all the way through.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 15, 2007

Unfolding like a gorgeous coffee-table book of photographs, Emanuele Crialese's film Golden Door is as lovely to look at as it is dramatically inert.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 15, 2007

The folkloric tone that seemed so pretentious in [Respiro] is powerfully effective here.

| Jun 15, 2007

A STRIKINGLY shot tale of Sicilian villagers seeking a better life in America, Golden Door is so minimalist, it's practically a silent film.

| Jun 15, 2007

A three-paneled piece, where the strength lies in the detail work rather than the larger brushstrokes.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 15, 2007

A movie about immigration that even Lou Dobbs can get behind. It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 15, 2007

There's an old Zen saying, 'It's the journey, not the destination.' The Golden Door offers an extraordinary journey of its own.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 15, 2007