[The film] is imbued with an almost poetic beauty, probably thanks to the work of Deakins (cinematography) and Horner (score)...[and another] great thing about [it] is the fact that the audience understands the positions of both Kathy and Behrani.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 9, 2024

The intuition that violent, terrible acts flow inexorably in part from Americans' unawareness and incomprehension of the simplest facts of their own lives is undeniably true.

| Feb 15, 2021

While the book reads as tragedy, the film feels like melodrama, and really hasn't the guts for Connolly's natural spirit and warmth, or Kingsley's beautiful canniness. They both feel completely throttled, done in by the film's over-calculated heaviness.

| Dec 20, 2017

... it recaptured my attention with the pitch-perfect performances of both Ben Kingsley and Shohreh Aghdashloo.

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 12, 2017

Serious and thoughtful; for mature teens+.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 24, 2010

A lack of empathetic characters cripples this poorly paced but well acted drama about an Iranian family who purchase a city-auctioned bungalow in Northern California after its former tenant has been unjustly evicted.

| Original Score: C | May 9, 2009

A fiercely powerful and melancholy tale about dreams, aspirations and belonging, House of Sand and Fog is a marvellous adaptation.

| Oct 18, 2008

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 7, 2008

The vivid clarity of the images, the compressed fury of the tale, are impossible to get out of your head.

| Nov 1, 2007

Perelman and his long-suffering stars make a spectacle of pain, but fail to register any lighter notes, while the denouement seems calculated to wring out every last tear.

| Jun 24, 2006

Demanding, provoking and painfully slow. The single most compelling reason for seeing it is the magnificent performance from Kingsley, who deserves every prize on the books.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2006

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

Vadim Perelman's "House of Sand and Fog" is one of the low points of the current movie season. But then it's meant to be.

| Original Score: B+ | Nov 18, 2005

If "House of Sand and Fog" ultimately feels like a failed exercise, it has less to do with Perelman's limitations than with a book that would have been better served by staying on the page.

| Sep 26, 2005

The dramatic scheme is to show how two people ... intersect "tragically," but what we see is a group of characters who act as wrongheadedly and intransigently as imaginable.

| Jul 19, 2005

An intense drama with a brilliant performance by Ben Kingsley.

| Original Score: A | Jun 20, 2005

Partially successful.

| Original Score: B | May 4, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 2, 2005

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 5, 2005