Sunshine

Pros: Rosemary Harris and Jennifer Ehle sharing a single role; Ralph Fiennes and William Hurt.
Cons: The length

As a fan of Ralph Fiennes, I eager awaited this film to hit my local theatre, and finally had to wait for it to be released on DVD to enjoy it. Oddly enough, despite the length of it, I did.

Covering over four generations of a Hungarian...

Pros: Ralph Fiennes, Rosemary Harris, story scope
Cons: The lessons of history always have to repeat themselves

"Sunshine" is an epic movie about the lives, loves, triumphs, and tragedies of a family of Hungarian Jews over the course of a century. The name of the family, Sonnenschein, means sunshine in German. At some point in the nineteenth century,...

Pros: Beautiful set decoration, wonderful direction, and tremendous acting.
Cons: Sub-par editing, occasional segments of over-indulgence on the part of the director.

To say that Sunshine was a good film would be a drastic understatement. As far as period pieces are concerned, this film ranks among my all time top ten. From simply a visual standpoint, this picture sets itself apart from most epics, in that it uses...

Pros: A sweeping saga with superb performances.
Cons: Too much, too long, some underdeveloped, some overdone

Hungarian director Istvan Szabos's epic, three-hour saga chronicles the rise and fall of three tumultuous generations of a troubled Hungarian Jewish family. Their name is Sonnenschein, which means sunshine in German; the title also refers to a...

Pros: cinematography, sets, costumes
Cons: lengthy, covers too much ground, Fiennes overacts

Sunshine is an expansive epic, chronicling four generations of a Jewish family in Hungary over three hours. This creates a multitude of characters and subplots.

The confusion is further increased by having one actor playing three...

Pros: Ralph Fiennes gives one of the best performances of his career.
Cons: None.

It is the summer and it is warm and, doubtless, you are in no mood for a melancholy film with only mild, epiphinous relief at its very end. Nevertheless, you should go out and rent Sunshine. It is an international production that stars only four...

Pros: Visually beautiful, well acted epic.
Cons: At times it is flat and too ambitious.

Sunshine features remarkable performances, beautiful cinematography and an affecting multi-generational story which will move you.

Before I begin my review. I'd like to make some sort of complaint. Let's call it a rant. This was going to be...

Pros: A sweeping story; strong performances all around, especially that of Rosemary Harris.
Cons: Casting of Ralph Fiennes in three different roles is a needless distraction.

István Szabó's sprawling script is about a Jewish family in Hungary and how they deal with society's attitudes toward their heritage over three generations and a span of a century. The resulting three-hour film, however, seems less about the...

Pros: Grand Scale Filmmaking at Its Finest
Cons: May Be Too Long For Most

István Szabó created Sunshine with the idea of documenting a world that collided with evils defeating evils, only to be usurped by more evils -- in this case, the wartorn history of Hungary in the twentieth century. Each evil is told through the eyes of...

Pros: compelling and gorgeous
Cons: weak third act

Rated R
Paramount Classics
180 minutes
starring Ralph Fiennes, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Weisz, Jennifer Ehle, Molly Parker, Deborah Kara Unger, James Frain, John Neville, Miriam Margolyes, David de Keyser, Mark Strong, William Hurt
...

Pros: The women do a decent job of acting
Cons: Boring, repetative, Ralph Fiennes stinks

“Sunshine” is a 3 hour plus epic that should have been a mini-series. Though this movie has received some critical praise, it will probably bore you to death.

“Sunshine” is an epic that covers the lives of 4 generations of a family in Hungary....

Pros: Amazing Great directing
Cons: Foreign Film, quite lengthy

The question of whether or not history repeats itself is often moot. History doesn't repeat itself; human beings repeat themselves and make the same mistakes over and over. One family's journey through the 20th century is the subject of Sunshine, the new...

Pros: Epic story, great characters
Cons: Not much chemistry

'Sunshine', the new three hour epic from Hungary's Istvan Szabo ('Mephisto'), is an epic near-masterpiece. The film depicts the journey of a Jewish family living in Hungary from before the turn of the last century through the fall of Communism. The film...

Pros: A few powerful moments
Cons: Too rushed and shallow

Will it sound too weird if I complain that, at three hours, the new movie “Sunshine” is too short?

Starring Ralph Fiennes, “Sunshine” tells the story of three generations of Hungarians. Fiennes plays each of the three leading men, and he’s...

Pros: Excellently done
Cons: Shows a very bad side of humanity

My wife and I saw this movie at the Little Theater, Rochester's Foreign, Independent, and Off-Beat theater complex. We didn't know much about the movie prior to seeing it, except that it was nearly 3 hours long. The movie turned out to be a historical...