Vysotsky projects an essential sunniness that helps keep the film from turning maudlin.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 29, 2003

It ultimately feels like a folly that sounded great in the filmmaker's head, so great that he had to be put on screen, where it flounders around with no small degree of embarrassment.

| Original Score: C- | Jul 11, 2003

The use of Bryan Adams as the madwoman's imagined paramour is indicative of just how mediocre this movie is.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 15, 2003

There's not much to Konchalovsky's tale ... but it's often beautifully told; a gentle fantasy of a harsh time.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 13, 2003

With its cast of nauseatingly lovable lunatics, House of Fools may make you feel like you've been tricked into suffering through the Kevin Spacey flick K-Pax with subtitles.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | May 22, 2003

Ruined from the start by its insulting depiction of mental illness.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 16, 2003

The misery I suffered in the Russian horror House of Fools, directed by the ridiculously overrated Andrei Konchalovsky, does deserve special scorn, but I don't have the stomach to rehash it.

| May 16, 2003

A kindly film with a generous heart beaming through the discordant rumblings of useless wars.

| May 16, 2003

A film that succeeds not by arguing that the world is crazier than the asylum, but by arriving at the melancholy possibility that both are equally insane.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 16, 2003

A humane and fantastic work, and it touches us precisely because Konchalovsky shows the reality of both the soldiers and the madhouse inmates.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 15, 2003

Embarrassingly fatuous and pretentious.

Full Review | May 2, 2003

You know the song. It's the one with the chorus that goes: 'Have you ever really, really, really ever loved a woman?' I mean, really.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 2, 2003

Perhaps, it's a labour of love; certainly, too often, it's a love that turns laboured.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 2, 2003

I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.

| May 2, 2003

Only adds to the sense that Mr. Konchalovsky has lost his artistic moorings. He has certainly lost his common sense.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Apr 25, 2003

Konchalovsky ... takes on a difficult subject with a light mix of dark humor and pathos.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 25, 2003

A superbly shot film of emotional extravagance, sentimentality and even humor.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2003

A film where individual scenes shine, but the sum of its parts is, frankly, banal.

Full Review | Apr 23, 2003

A blast crater of preening caricature and stupefying narrative ideas.

Full Review | Apr 22, 2003