Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

adonis98-743-186503 The story of Amos Oz's youth, set against the backdrop of the end of the British Mandate for Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel. The film details the young man's relationship with his mother and his beginnings as a writer, while looking at what happens when the stories we tell become the stories we live. A Tale of Love and Darkness has noble intentions and it tries to tell a story for sure but the thin written script, the slow pacing and even the actors fade away after a while. Plus the movie is based in some kind of a book which i haven't read and i don't plan to be honest i'm just reviewing the movie and i'm sorry but even Natalie Portman who is also the director and writer of the film should probably stick to acting for the best.

Howard Schumann In a quiet moment in Natalie Portman's ("Knight of Cups") beautiful and poetic A Tale of Love and Darkness, a mother says to her young son "If you have to choose between telling a lie or insulting someone, choose to be generous." When the boy asks her whether or not it is alright to lie, she replies, "Sometimes... yes. It's better to be sensitive than to be honest." It is an important lesson, one I wish I had learned earlier in my life. Written and directed by Portman, who also stars as Fania, Amos' (Amir Tessler) troubled mother, the film is based on the memoir of Israeli novelist and journalist Amos Oz and is set in Jerusalem in the critical period before the transition from the British mandate in Palestine to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 following the Arab-Israeli War.Opening in 1945 after the Klausner's escape from the desecration of a once vibrant culture in Eastern Europe, it is the story of the early influences in Oz's life that propelled him to become a famous writer. As narrated by Moni Moshonov and told from the viewpoint of the older Amos Oz recollecting his past, the film attempts to probe the depths of a family whose dream of a land of milk and honey becomes darker as it progresses, telling us that the worst thing that can happen to a dream is that it is fulfilled. Amos' father Arieh (Gilad Kahana, "The Man in the Wall") is a librarian who has just published is first novel and desperately wants to achieve the success of his own father, historian Joseph Klausner. Though he does not succeed, he never stops being thankful for Israel, telling his son, "You'll be bullied in school, but not because you're Jewish." We learn early in the film that Amos' mother Fania blames herself for leaving behind a life of wealth. It is a self-inflicted wound exacerbated by her own mother's verbal cruelty, one that is manifested by insomnia, migraine headaches, and a long struggle with depression that ended with her suicide at the young age of 38. Fania is a story teller whose stories, fables, and tales of far-away lands continue to enrich Amos' life and Amos himself begins to tell stories to keep bullies from attacking him at school. The humble Amos denies that he is sensitive, saying he wants to be a farmer or a dog murderer and goes to work on a kibbutz, but the sensitive can do nothing about who they are but only attempt to share it and make it real for others.Amos' story is depicted in the context of the short-lived joy after the U.N.'s vote to partition Palestine and the Arab attacks on Jerusalem that killed many of the family's friends and neighbors. Their home becomes a shelter for those fleeing the Arab bombs and the real consequences of Zionism and the ideal of statehood become apparent, a society caught between memories of the holocaust and fears that it will happen again. As Fania's growing depression and her drift from reality dominates the landscape, the film loses a measure of dramatic impact, yet it remains compelling and literate, attesting to the way the promise of Israel has been shattered by strident voices fighting centuries-old struggles for domination.A Tale of Love and Darkness is an intimate film, a film of memory, one told in incidents and flashbacks. Like a film of Terence Malick, it talks in whispers, a language that exists only in the soul. There is little plot to describe, only moods and gestures. Fania's death is the film's central theme and it remains a mystery, buried in the enigma of a woman who has forgotten how to dream, yet it is transcended by the death of the dream of two vibrant cultures living together in peace and brotherhood. Early in the film, Amos is on his best behavior at a party in the home of a Palestinian neighbor. When he meets an Arab girl who can speak Hebrew, there is an immediate connection and he tells her that "there is room for two peoples in this land," but the dream ends suddenly when Amos, playing at being Tarzan, falls from a tree when the chains of a swing break injuring a little girl and the sudden chasm between the two cultures becomes a sad portent of the future.

jsharma Natali Portman directed the movie A tale of Love and Darkness centered around a husband, wife and son in Jerusalem. Natalie Portman played the role of Fanna Oz , the wife who is happy to be with her husband and son. Fanna depends on her son's innocence to make her life happy. Fanna has a tendency to go into depressed moods. Though she has borne a son , her mind goes back to her lover's face and she , a mother, suffers from severe depression. The son, Amos Oz played very well by Amir Tessler , watches his mother sitting in a trance, oblivious of his presence. Amos watches and listens to his mother grappling with depression and encouraging her husband who is Amos father to have relationships outside their marriage. Amos sees his dad sharing loving moments with his mom and then watches dad sharing affectionate moments with a total stranger in a cafe. Natalie Portman , plays the role of a depressed woman , very well. the movie needed editing. Some scenes were too long without any substance. The movie is only for 95 minutes (much shorter than Angelina Jolie's directed movie Unbroken 137 minutes). Too long.

Nozz The movie is beautiful and sometimes quite self-conscious about it, settling into a sequence of many set pieces each of which seems to make a point of its own until remembering them all (to see how they're relevant later on) becomes quite a chore, at least for a bear of little brain like me. There is not much dramatic impetus driving the film along, except that at one point the War of Independence carries the action with its start, middle, and end. What keeps the audience in its seat is more the poetry of the visuals and the thoughtfulness of the text than any great tension or suspense from moment to moment.A juvenile actor in a major role is always a challenge. In this case, the kid certainly doesn't spoil the movie, but he doesn't make the scenes his own either. His looks don't proclaim him to be the naive and sensitive outsider he's supposed to be; in fact his looks aren't distinctive at all, and a single child actor is used for too many years of plot. (At the start he's behaving too much younger than he looks.)The narrator explains in retrospect that the Arabs and Jews of Palestine would have got along fine if only they had understood they were all fellow victims of Europe. The proposition is questionable in the light of the current war of civilizations, but coming from writer Amos Oz it is a mercifully mild example of his kooky politics and we're lucky the film contains nothing worse. Natalie Portman was allowed to make Oz' book into a melancholy elegy that resembles a walk through a beautiful but exhaustingly large museum. Item after item. "It was nice," I said to my wife afterward. "It was, but toward the end I was just waiting for it to finish," she replied.