Toronto and NYFF preview. Secret Sunshine.

"After several plot turns that I refuse to spoil, Secret Sunshine [site] becomes, among many other things, the truest depiction of evangelical Christianity I've seen on film," writes Darren Hughes. "Fortunately, [Lee Chang-dong's] film is not evangelical itself and, instead, wrestles with the strangeness and disappointments of faith in a way that The Mourning Forest, with its contrivances, could only mimic. Damn, I love this film."

"The film is brave and unsparing (as is Jeon [Do-yeon]'s performance) and asks some challenging and disquieting questions, among them whether human values such as love, mercy, morality, meaning and forgiveness still have meaning if we shift the ultimate responsibility for them away from human beings onto some (Christian, in this case) concept of God," writes Jim Emerson. "It's a hard film to write about without using superlatives."

"My problem with the movie is that I kept resisting the narrative, never quite able to give myself to a story that deals in extremes," writes J Robert Parks. "[F]or now, it's a film I admire more than I like."

"It's hard to reconcile the temporal and emotional virtuosity of the first half with the dissipation into rote spitefulness of the second," writes Kevin Lee at Slant.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Posted by dwhudson at September 25, 2007 8:33 AM