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34 out of 45 people found the following comment useful :-
In the finest tradition of Tarkovsky, 17 septembre 2007

Author: death-hilarious de Canada

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

This second feature film from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev had a lot to live up to considering how great his 2003 debut, The Return, was. I was really a bit skeptical going in because the advanced reviews had been mixed, and I really didn't know how a director who had made such brilliant use of the Russian landscape as almost a perpetually menacing character in its own right, would handle what sounded like a very indoor domestic drama. Boy was I wrong to doubt. Zvyagintsev and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman find an abundance of interesting things to shoot, from drab constantly overcast soviet-era industrial cities to old decaying farmsteads. I love the way these two frame and light almost every shot and the slow stalking way the camera pans and moves is almost deliberately predatory. I'd probably be mesmerized if these two shot nothing but landscapes and people for two hours with no plot whatsoever, which, to be fair, is what the movie feels like at times, considering how minimal and terse the typically Russian script is. The story revolves around a man (played by Konstantin Lavronenko who also starred in the Return), who moves his wife and two young children from the city to his father's old farm in the country where he expects better prospects for work. While in the country his wife reveals something that threatens to tear the family apart. Like the Return, the Banishment is about the tragic consequences of the failure of individuals to make emotional contact, communicate, and ultimately understand each other. Unfortunately the final denouement, which unravels through a few too many twists for a story this simple and sparse, is really unsatisfying because it strips all the characters of any last shred of sympathy, leaving the audience almost indifferent towards them. Still, this was so brilliantly photographed and paced that I couldn't help but enjoy every shot.

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14 out of 19 people found the following comment useful :-
Gorgeous movie, 23 décembre 2007

Author: vladroman_5 de Romania

One doesn't have to be brilliant to understand Andrei Zvyagintsev's movies, still one must be very flexible with his own cultural background if interested to comprehend the images Zvyagintsev makes use of. So, my vote (10) goes especially for this aspect, with a minimal astriction for the screenplay, slightly overexposed. Altogether, the director proved he is able to move to different fields.

After The Return, I expected to see another close-to-Tarkovski picture, but it's not the case. Izgnanie rebuilds other spaces (think of the affinity for the Flemish and the Dutch painters, even if somehow altered in the old Russian manner) and distributes along the images a new and equally strong despondency. The images are just superb, with hundreds of important details in need to be discussed. My feeling is that nothing goes for the characters as they are continuously overwritten by their own disability to surpass the air they themselves have exhaled.

A must see

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10 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Better and more complex than "The Return", 23 décembre 2007

Author: Jugu Abraham (jugu_abraham@yahoo.co.uk) de Trivandrum, Kerala, India

Andrei Zvyagintsev's second film "The Banishment," if evaluated closely, could arguably be as interesting as his first film The Return, if not better. Both relate to related concepts "Father" and "Love/Absence of Love." In both films, there are few words spoken.

To evaluate "The Banishment" is like completing a challenging crossword puzzle. You would know this unusual situation if you have seen "The Return." To begin "The Return" was not based on a novel. This one is. That, too, a William Saroyan novel—"The Laughing Matter." Yet the director is not presenting us with Saroyan's novel on the screen. He develops the wife as a woman "more sinn'd against than sinning," while in the novel she is mentally unstable. Understandably, the director decides to drop the Saroyan title. Thus the words "I am going to have a child. It's not yours" provides two utterly distinct scenarios depending on whether the woman who speaks those words to her husband is a saintly person or a mentally unhinged woman. The change in the character of the wife by the director opens a totally new perspective to the Saroyan story—a tool that contemporary filmmakers frequently use, not to wreck literary works, but creatively revive interest in the possibilities a change in the original work provides.

Those viewers familiar with the plethora of Christian symbolism in "The Return" will spot the painting on which the children play jigsaw is one of an angel visiting Mary, mother of Jesus, to reveal that she will give birth even if she is a virgin. This shot is followed by a black kitten walking across the painting. And the forced abortion operation at the behest of the husband begins on Vera, the wife in Zvyagintsev's film. By the end of the film the viewer will realize that the director had left a clue for the viewer—not through conventional character development using long conversations.

"The Banishment" is representative of contemporary cinema provoking viewers to enjoy cinema beyond the story by deciphering symbols strewn around amongst layers of meaning structured within the screenplay.

As usual, the cinema of director Zvyagintsev is full of allusions to the Bible. This is the third famous film that refers to a single abstract chapter in the Bible on love: 1 Corinthians Chapter 13. In "The Banishment" the chapter is read by the neighbors' daughters. In Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Blue", set to the musical score sung towards the end of the film a choral musical piece sings the words "If I have not love, I am nothing" from the same Biblical chapter commenting indirectly on communication breakdown between husband and wife and the slow and painful reconciliation with the husband's lover. Bergman's "Through a glass darkly" is a phrase on taken from the same chapter of the Bible, a film also on lack of communication and love between father and son, husbands and wives.

The banishment alludes to the banishment of Adam from the Garden of Eden represented in the film by the anti-hero's tranquil family house, far from the inferred socio-political turbulence elsewhere. Soon after the wife's proclamation we see her children playing with the jigsaw puzzle depicting an angel appearing to Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, that she will bear a child. These clues indicate to the viewer that wife was innocent. In the movie, these are but a few of the dozens of symbols and metaphors that extend even to the selection of classical music. As usual, the cinema of director Zvyagintsev is full of allusions to the Bible. The banishment alludes to the banishment of Adam from Eden represented in the film by the anti-hero's tranquil family house, far from the inferred socio-political turbulence elsewhere. A black kitten crosses the jigsaw puzzle and tragedy follows. These clues indicate to the viewer that wife was innocent. In the movie, these are but a few of the dozens of symbols and metaphors that extend even to the selection of classical music Bach's Magnificat or the "Song of Virgin Mary". There is washing of the brother's bullet hit arm, reminiscent of Pilate washing his hands in the Bible.

While the story and structure of "The Return" is easier to comprehend, "The Banishment" is more complex. The first half of the film entices the viewer to reach the wrong conclusions. The Father is correct, the wife is wrong. The second half of the film surprises the viewer as all assumptions of the viewer made from the preceding episodes are turned topsy-turvy. Men are arrogant, egotistical and father children without love. There is no love in the silent train journey of the family while the wife is looking at her husband with love. Like Kieslowski's "Blue" the woman appears stronger than the man—and in an apt epilogue its women (harvesting a field) who are singing a song of hope and regeneration.

A supposed major flaw noted by critics is the lack of character development. In this film, Zvyagintsev develops characters using silent journeys (lack of communication) and misconstruing of reality ("child is not ours"), very close to the storyline of the director's first film. Actually, Zvyagintsev progresses in this second film by extending the relationship of "Father and children" in the first film, to "Father and wife" in the second. In the first film, children do not understand the father; in the second, the father does not understand his wife. When he does it is too late, just as the kids in the first film of the director. This is a film that requires several viewings to savor its many ingredients of photography, music, and screenplay writing. Zvyagintsev is not merely copying directors Tarkovsky, Bergman and Kieslowski—-he is exploring new territories by teasing his viewer to "suspend his/her belief" and constantly re-evaluate what was shown earlier.

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10 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
A long haunting puzzle that's never really put together, 27 février 2008

Author: Chris Knipp de Berkeley, California

Not as strong as Zvyagintsev's haunting 2003 debut 'The Return'/'Vozvrashcheniye' (grand prize at Venice--I reviewed it when it was shown theatrically in the US the following year), this adaptation of William Saroyan's 1953 novella, "The Laughing Matter," is recognizable for its intense, slow-paced style and beautiful cinematography (by Mikhail Krichman). 'Izgnanie' (the Russian title) takes us out to a remote country house where there are thin roads, grassy fields over gentle hills, herds of sheep -- and old friends, because this is the childhood home of the protagonist Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko), who's brought his family out there for summer vacation. But before that (and a signal of a certain disjointedness of the whole film) we observe Mark (Alexander Baluev), Alex's obviously gangsterish brother, getting him to remove a bullet from his arm. this is also the first of a series of failures to seek adequate medical treatment. Now we move to Alex with his wife Vera (Maria Bonnevie) taking their young son Kir (Maxim Shibaev) and younger daughter Eva (Katya Kulkina) out to the country by car.

Zvagintsev certainly takes his time with every action of the film. It's as if he thought he was writing a 500-page novel rather than making a movie. The effect is not so much a sense of completeness as a kind of hypnotic trance. Everything is marked by the fine clear light, the frequent use of long shots, and the pale blue filters that give everything a distinctive look. Some of the long landscape shots are absolutely stunning, and the interior light and the way shadows gently caress the faces are almost too good to be true.

When another family comes into the picture and they all spend a day outdoors, the sense of familiarity, summer listlessness, and vague unease made me think of a play by William Inge or Tennessee Williams. That may seem odd for a Russian movie, but the names are only partly Russian, the location is deliberately indeterminate, and Saroyan's source story is set in a long-ago California, not in Russia. Zvyagintsev doesn't seem to work in the real world but in some kind of super-real nether-land. Whether it is unforgettable or simply off-putting seems to vary. In 'The Return' it as the former; here it is more the latter.

Vera drops a bombshell, when she announces she's pregnant and that the child isn't his. The tragedy that slowly but inexorably follows arises from a derangement in the wife and a misunderstanding by the husband. To deal with the problem Alex wants the children out of the way and he is happy to have them stay at the friends' house, where they're putting together a large jigsaw puzzle of Leonardo da Vinci's painting, 'The Annunciation'. I'm indebted to Jay Weissberg's review in 'Variety' for this identification; Weissberg adds, "That... isn't the only piece of heavy-handed religious imagery on offer. There's Alex washing his brother's blood off his hands, Eva/Eve offered an apple, and a Bible recitation from 1 Corinthians about love ("It does not insist on its own way"), handily set apart by a bookmark depicting Masaccio's 'The Expulsion From the Garden of Eden.' OK, we get it, but that doesn't mean the parallels offer a doorway into personalities who offer little emotional residue on their own." And he is right: Zvyagintsev's fascination with Italian painting, and here also with the Bible, doesn't change the fact that the characters nonetheless remain, this time, troublingly opaque. Mark is an adviser and stimulus to action for Alex. Robert (Dmitry Ulianov) is a third brother who enters the picture later. I will not go into the details because the chief interest of the film is its slow revelations.

And yet the revelations don't quite convince, because for one thing they do not fully explain. The wife's behavior remains unaccountable. And a long flashback in the latter part of the film seems to come too late, and to explain too much, yet without explaining enough. None of this is the fault of the actors, who are fine, including the children.

Zvyagintsev's second film, then, is a disappointment and a puzzlement. I began to think after a while that the whole thing would be much more effective if it were done in a very simple style, with simply workmanlike photography, in a film trimmed of all externals, down to the bone, something noirish like Robert Siodmak's 'The Killers' or Kubrick's 'The Killing.' We are left to figure things out anyway, so why all the flourishes? Yet Zvyagintsev's style is nonetheless beautiful, and one only hopes he finds material that works better for him next time. I was thrilled with 'The Return' and wrote of it in my IMDb Comment: "This stunning debut features exceptional performances by the talented young actors, brilliant storytelling in a fable-like tale that's as resonant as it is specific, and exquisite cinematography not quite like any one's ever seen before." The excitement I felt about the first film is why the new one feels like such a let-down.

Seen as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series Film Comment Selects 2008 (February 25) at the Walter Reade Theater, NYC.

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6 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
Love is God, but is God really love, 23 décembre 2007

Author: Satish Naidu de India

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

There is a vast difference between being emotionally inert and being emotionally hollow. As much as Vozvrashcheniye (The Return, 2003) was intense, Andrei Zvyagintsev sophomore feature Izgnanie (The Banishment) is hollow. An emotional hollowness that engulfs us, holding us captive along with these tragic characters. I say captive because I so desperately wanted them to make things up, but our nature and the choices it sometimes leads us to make often renders the tragedy inevitable. There is a great deal of silence in the film; most of these moments between the husband Alexander (Konstantin Lavronenko) and the wife Vera (Maria Bonnevie). As long as a relationship is having constant arguments of any kind, I believe, it is still far from the rocky paths. But once silence creeps in it usually will signal the point of no return. Izgnanie starts off with a great shot of a car running along a picturesque landscape of the Russian country. Mark (Aleksandr Baluyev) drives to his brother Alexander's home in the middle of the night where he has his upper-arm suffering from a gun shot wound fixed, and the bullet taken out. The very next day, Alex and his family, relocate to their countryside home amidst the breathtaking serenity of the scenery. Yet, these people are banished from country (Garden of Eden) for there's no peace in their lives. Silence yes, and a hell of a lot of it. But peace none at all. The urban world and its rush might conceal that silence, but the country has its own to offer. Vera reveals to Alex that she's pregnant, and the child is not his. Perhaps the external silence is too much for her to bear. Alexander is a great character and it is a great performance from Lavronenko. A classic case who has been influenced during his growing days and now is himself influential. Perhaps we all are, in varying degrees. In a lesser film he would have been a stoic binary individual, one of those standard-etched characters that respond in only two ways. But what Alex achieves here is to capture an individual who has added layers and layers to conceal himself, to conceal his vulnerability. As against popular conception, the layer addition is somewhat of an involuntary task. The wife has so desperately tried to penetrate those layers and to truly know her husband all her married life. And now the vacuum is too much for her to bear. Not because she is feeling lonely, but she can foresee where her son is being led to. Where her children are being led to. This is an extremely complex portrayal of parenting. Most films that intend to showcase negative parenting are loud and usually exaggerate the effects compressing them into a rather small time frame. This understands what happens and how the nature of a parent, good or bad, is gradually impressed upon the child. An impression that is infinitely complex than being just plain good or bad. Taare Zameen Par is juvenile in its portrayal of the parent; just as no boy is bad I bet there're few parents who are bad. A father is a child's hero, always. I can never overestimate the profound influence my father's persona has had on me. Vera discloses the secret herself in hope of a final attempt at breaking that shell. But it is impenetrable, that shell. It is transparent, but it is impenetrable. Then there's the other silence. The one that exist between the two brothers – Mark and Alexander. It is the silence that prospers between two individuals who're essentially one, the kind who understand the other's every little action every little word and every little moment. These are two individuals who've been together and stayed together every step of the rocky road. And when one experiences a tragedy, it is the other that suffers. It is a great study, the bond between the brothers. As much as I felt captive within the vacuum of the marriage, I would want to be company to these two brothers as they grew up. I would want to know if they share the same secret of brotherly love-respect-hate. Outside of Tarkovsky's cinema, I have never experienced such a great blend of serenity and silence. Zvyagintsev is a master, who pulls of every trick of his with mathematical precision. He's ably accompanied by the cinematography of Mikhail Krichman, his comrade from his debut film, and they create a profound location out of the otherwise ordinary countryside. This is the Garden of Eden, and with a budget that I suspect is as low as the first one (it was under $500,000). But what the results they achieve is worth billions, the landscape here is a character on its own. The camera is essentially still, and even during the occasional instances when it moves, the results are essentially still. This is an extremely beautiful film to look at, and that it is about such painful characters inhabiting a tragic family is all the more ironic. The secret of the breathtaking prowess of the film's effectiveness, and its screenplay is that it doesn't go for plot markers. It takes its time, and makes us privy to the drama as it unfolds, almost in real time. Love is God, it is said. And God is love. And yet, these people who are incapable of overcoming their shortcomings to achieve love for one another is horrifying, to a certain degree. For if God is love, why doesn't he himself overcome his shortcomings and help these people out of their vacuum. One of the great films of this year.

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12 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
Another interpretation,another tradition, 2 janvier 2008

Author: shusei de Japan

In "The Return" we saw a citation from renaissance painting by Andrea Mantenia,"The Lamentation over the Dead Christ", which had been cited also by Tarkovsky in "Soryalis". Then we saw also black and white photography,resembling in texture to that in "The Mirror(Zerkolo)",and tracking back into the forest from open space with the water("The Mirror" and "Sacrifice"). All these citations or reminiscences naturally reminded us of Tarkovsky's cinematographic tradition. So it's not strange that Zvyagintsev was then mentioned as his successor.

But in "Izgnanie" we can see also reminiscences of another,religious and one of the greatest director;Robert Bresson. Children with a little donkey from "Au hasard, Balthazar",the use of windows and doors as symbols of human isolation,framing of shots which make us feel not too close,not too distant form characters... As far as I remember, Bresson wrote about "ironed"shots as his ideal material for editing.For him,and for Zvyagintsev,cinema is not an instrument to "move" viewers' soul,but only a key, through which every viewer's mind must find the way to the higher Order. I would say that Bresson made religious novella in laconic prose, but Zvyagintsev makes religious fable with poetic language.

In this time too, we see reminiscences of Tarkovsky(the composition and camera movement of the first shot,for example),but here an another tradition,which the director follows, is clearly shown.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Zvyagintsev creates a stark, grave allegory of marital and familial disintegration, 28 août 2008

Author: movedout de http://thescreenbug.blogspot.com

Andrey Zvyagintsev's "The Banishment" is a stark, grave allegory of marital and familial disintegration. The father, Alexander (Best Actor at Cannes 2007, Konstantin Lavronenko)—a slight, lithe, laconic character—faces an unconscionable choice midway through the film. His wife, Vera (Maria Bonnevie), is a quietly tired mother masking a great deal of uncertainty behind pained eyes and faded beauty. Their young children, Kir and Eva, sense that a storm is brewing. This is Zvyagintsev's despairing poetry on the toxic disconnect between loved ones, surveying the limbo between the way things are and the way it should be.

"I'm pregnant, but it's not yours," Vera says unhurriedly, looking at her husband imploringly, eyes beseeching, as they lounge on the patio of Alexander's hilltop childhood home in the countryside, far away from the bleak greys of the industrial city where they reside. In that moment, Alexander realises the shift from mental to physical infidelity, less mindful to the betrayal he refuses to talk about than he is to his pride taking a dent. For the first time, the angular complexity of Lavronenko's face twists into a wordless rage that reveals his only response to the malaise rising within this marriage.

Alexander meets surreptitiously with his shady brother Mark (Aleksandr Baluyev), a criminal sort that needed stitching up and a bullet removed from his arm in the dead of the night just days before. Mark informs Alexander of a gun he left up in a dresser at their father's home. The moral landscape opens up here with two paths—to forgive or to kill. Both choices demand a hefty price, but remain acceptable as long as one is able to reconcile one's self with it.

Zvyagintsev creates a dreary mood piece, sustained with tension and a deeply burdening excavation of secrets and silence. There's an exploration of miscommunication here, not lies. The unspoken becomes just as virulent as falsities; the emotional estrangement between people becomes a source of dehumanising decay. The story of family is timeless in its essence, but intermittent, it's intrinsic morality however, is everything. Once again, the past has a way of rearing itself into the future. Just as Zvyagintsev saw profundity in the role of the Father in his mesmerising debut, "The Return", he sees the same here in the dynamics between parents and of spouses. The themes remain similar, but the religiosity of his enterprise is clunkier and more obtrusive.

While the acknowledged influence is Andrei Tarkovsky—nature and pastoral simplicity as it relates to the inner self and the interplay of religious iconography—the resonance of the camera is plainly Zvyagintsev's. The director, once again working with the cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, seems incapable of framing an ugly image: the open spaces of the golden countryside becomes stupefying and the creaky house itself hinges on a chasm, a solitary wooden bridge is the sole connection to a world outside the confines of family. As the narrative bends and folds, so does Zvyagintsev's virtuosity with visual chicanery—images and shots blend into one another, revealing the webs of space and time.

For all its technical poise, Zvyagintsev's story lacks the emotional veracity of his debut. From each shot, right down to its script, everything is so precisely composed that the film becomes antiseptic beneath the tragedy by justifying its theoretical banality with intense symbolism and inorganic actions. Characters have weight but no reality—they seem becalmed, even unaffected—they are ideas acted upon, props for a rambling parable and dangerously on the verge of evoking ennui. But in spite of its inherently languorous sermon, Zvyagintsev tackles the film with the cinematic prose of epic literature by enveloping the film with an aura of solemnity and disquiet.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
From the outside, characters are clearly sophisticated enough and it is curious why connection never gets there., 24 juillet 2008

Author: crey014 de Auckland, New Zealand

A respectable family drama with its style and lethargic editing its main drawback, "Izgnanie" will also definitely test the patient, even Andrei Zvyagintsev's most loyal of fans. Insecurity over the plot is palpable as film overextends its welcome with pondering and introspective filming that doesn't quite translate well on screen. Plot and cinematography, especially in the countryside, offer some solace to art house fans, however audience will wonder why it took too long to make the point.

Film follows a middle class family as they go to the pastoral countryside, presumably where the paternal character, Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko) grew up. Plot only advances approximately an hour in the picture as a reveal is introduced. Character and story development is sporadic, definitely welcome, as it reminds audience that they aren't watching paint dry. The final act in the film, a flashback, carries the meatier part of the movie as it emphasizes the tragedy that happens earlier. Adultery, abortion and family secrets are aplenty, however seen and are better executed before.

Best actor nod for Konstantin Lavronenko at Cannes 2007 is somewhat deserving. It is indeed a subtle performance, however doesn't hold a candle to other actors vying for the same gong.

With an abundance of establishing shots and transport moving in and out of frame, the film could have easily eliminated 30 minutes of its 2 and a half-hour running time. Anna Mass, the editor, has puzzled together a film that wallows in atmosphere and creates images that are borderline pseudo-cathartic. Such scenes include a 3-minute trailing shot of water flowing from a water source that stopped delivering hydration before. May have functioned as time change and indication of liminal moment, but overly indulgent nonetheless, as it feels that it's delivered as art for art's sake.

Adapted from a novel by William Saroyan, it is clear that translation is also a problem. With the production of the film being abject to the characters, audience is clearly not allowed into these personalities, only as observers. This abjectivity produces lack of engagement that a plot like this could easily flourish on. From the outside, characters are clearly sophisticated enough and it is curious why connection never gets there.

English title is marketed as "The Banishment" as it may signify a plethora of themes and undertones in the movie. It straight up refers to the family's eviction from their 'idealised' Eden in a midtown neighborhood (although clearly far from it as it is depicted as violent and drab), but also refers to the individual isolation of the characters from one another. They are all devoid of communication or any sort of outward emotional connection, except for hate, contempt and the chains of nuclear family. Film becomes a burning effigy to families that are only bonded because they have to.

What could have been a beautifully insightful movie on the danger of disregard of family bonds, film overachieves in being meditative to a fault: dragging its run time to way beyond its limits, diluting its intended purpose. The patient will find satisfaction but will still notice the film's over the top brooding by overstuffing it with non-consequential establishing shots, pretending to be worth more than it is.

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16 out of 33 people found the following comment useful :-
Profound movie about relationships and destiny: 10 stars at "illustris Star Scale", 12 octobre 2007

Author: illustris de (moscow)

I give it TEN STARS* at my scale.

Additional remarks: This is not a thriller or smashing computer-aided million dollar blockbuster. Instead this is a genuine masterpiece of classical cinematography. Very profound characters, the plot is taking place out of time and geography concentrating our attention on the people's relationships and the mother nature's surroundings, like real life flow.

The other title I would give this movie would be "The Destiny". There are moments in our lives when the certain acts that we perform or even conceive may irrevocably change our life. This movie is about this. Who we listen to, who we ignore, who we selfishly love, why meandering from our true self may destroy ourselves and even ruin everything one has built, and how perilous it is sometimes to be our true selfish self.

Many people blame this movie for the slow pace and scenes of nature, but exactly these two things perfectly serve as background for the development of the events and characters like they were real living people. Even the children in the movie do their job very well. My advice is just to relax and flow along the plot, living together with the characters, at least for two hours.

One incomprehensible thing, nonetheless the camera in the movie may seem unsophisticated the certain images remain branded into my mind, clear images, like in one's childhood. This is real magic pertaining to true cinematography.

* --- I have an independent approach to rating movies. I use it myself and it proved to be helpful to my friends. This approach does not reflect any specific quality, nor playing of actors, camera work, director, script or even budget. Instead, it ranges the work as a whole, indicating its consumer value and time-provedness. The rating can be easily applied to other entertainment articles like music CDs, books or performances, thus making the method universal and simple for both using and understanding. It ranges from one to ten stars according to the statements:

1*......... - I started watching but quit before the end. (I left the house).

2**........ - I could hardly sit out till the end.

3***....... - I saw it once. (It's worth watching once).

4****...... - I saw it and would recommend it to my friends. (It's a discovery!).

5*****..... - I would watch it again and could join a company. (Next time I can invite my friends).

6******.... - I can go and watch it many times. (I must find out if they sell it).

7*******... - I saw it and am about to buy a copy. (Happy to have it on my shelf).

8********.. - I saw it and bought it, I enjoy re-watching selected episodes.

9*********. - I saw and bought it - it comes as a source of citations.

10********** - I saw and bought it, the source of all time enjoyment, my favorite. (Next generation will appreciate it like in 10 or 20 years as well).

If you'd like to use the method please mention it as "illustris Star Scale"

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1 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
disastrous ending and too heavy on religious symbolism, 18 mai 2008

Author: slowboatmo de United States

Despite this movie's tremendous potential to be turned into an impeccable piece of work that would resound in people's minds for years, it fails to fully realize its potential with its overdose of religious images that clearly mirror that of Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky's films are always too slow and heavy to watch with its long lingering shots that at its best only make for mental masturbation. I was really worried that the director of "banishment" would follow Tarkovsky's steps after first seeing the self-indulgent lingering shots and he did more and more of those later in the film. I think "the return" is a perfect film without any unnecessary conversations or lingering shots but this movie failed to carry the flag of the first one. All in all, the excessive twists of the plot and the pretentious religious symbolism are drawbacks of this otherwise spectacular film despite the stunning cinematography, perfect editing and imposing style. That being said, it is still better than 99% of the films I have seen in my life. Hope the director's next one will be better.

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