Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Ed-from-HI Natalie Portman undertook the difficult task of adapting (for Film) renowned author Amos Oz's wistfully poetic, insightful and humane memoir of early life in Jerusalem just before and slightly after Israel had earned Statehood.**Spoiler Alert**This is challenging material in terms of both the deeply-personal and tumultuous historical perspectives presented as Natalie Portman courageously navigated the tragically despairing pathways encountered by Fania Mussman-Klausner, Amos Oz's beloved mother who appeared mysteriously plagued by unidentifiable but  relentless emotional  torment, seeking momentary escape within the World of imagination & dreams but never able to fully-reconcile the transitional upheaval from her once comfortable-cultured Life in Eastern-Europe vs. the more unpredictable-tenuous one encountered in pre & post-WWII Jerusalem.The key to this film's believability is Portman's ability to pinpoint the heart +soul of Fania Mussman (with all the inner-torment inherent), also allowing little Amos Oz's burgeoning brightness & curiosity to intermittently shine-thru at times.A slight warning to viewers is that there exists a near oppressive bleakness to some of Amos Oz's recollections, especially with regards to his beloved mother's trials & travails (but thankfully peppered with momentary respite in the form of dreamlike scenes infused with poetic escapism).  In the current Day (2017), it is sometimes easy to forget the fact that the numerous pre & post WWII arrivals to Jerusalem/ Israel were mainly beleaguered refugees barely escaping the holocaust dreaming of a land where they could once again simply Live as Jews without relentless persecution and death attached to the horrific WWII Epoch. Amos Oz's book and Natalie Portman's important film ruminate on historical recollections that although sometimes deeply-painful must occupy a hallowed eternal space in memory.

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.

Gregory E Kitchens Screenwriter/director Natalie Portman's A Tale of Love and Darkness is a brilliantly conceived, masterfully crafted, emotionally powerful, exceptionally thought-provoking work of art. Though Portman's screenplay is based on the memoir by Amos Oz, the resulting film is not just a simple, chronological narrative about the author's life. Instead, Portman has crafted a uniquely cinematic depiction of Oz's attempt to understand his mother's (and to a lesser extent, his father's) psychological state of mind leading up to a crucial event in their lives, in order to explain how it affected his later life. A lessor artist would have been content to simply tell us what happened, but Portman's focus is on helping us understand Oz's beliefs about why it happened, with every scene in the film being a clue to help illuminate his reasoning. To render this complex story of self-analysis in cinematic terms, Portman presents the story from Amos Oz's point of view, using a narrator (portraying Oz at age 63) to guide us through all of the memories he uses as clues to try to understand his parent's actions. But instead of having the narrator explain the relevance of each memory as the film proceeds, Portman challenges us to collect all of the pieces of a complex psychological puzzle so that when the narrator finally explains his conclusion, we are able to duplicate Oz's intellectual process and put the pieces together ourselves, allowing us to understand why Oz chooses to believe what he chooses to believe. Oz's analysis is presented as an intriguing blend of second-hand knowledge of his parents' early life, facts he knows about his parents from first-hand experience (often from spying on them), life-lessons his mother taught him, lessons he learned from real-life experiences, metaphors he discovered in the stories that he and his mother created together for fun, and symbolism he found in the etymology of Hebrew words taught to him by his father. Portman's script manages to weave together all of these different types of clues into an impressionistic pattern that gives the narrator's conclusion a ring of truth once it is revealed. Even so, Portman gives us a lot to think about. For one thing, some of the clues are complicated, requiring the audience to piece together information learned in different scenes. For example, Amos and his mother, Fania, are each bullied by different people in separate scenes, and Portman leaves it up to the audience to compare the ways that Fania and Amos handle the bullying, and to figure out how this helps Amos understand his mother's psychology. As another example, there is a heartbreaking scene that shows what happened during a chance meeting between a young, idealistic Amos and a Palestinian girl prior to the outbreak of war. That scene, combined with the scenes comparing the Jewish people's expectations about the future of Israel to the reality that emerges during and after the war, teaches Oz about a particular aspect of human nature that proves to be a crucial element of his reasoning. Portman also adds depth to this film by including a scene where Fania tells Amos that nobody can truly understand another human being and it is better to accept not knowing than to believe erroneously. This scene adds yet another layer of melancholy to an already gloomy story by implying that no matter how much thought Oz has given this matter nor how well reasoned his conclusion, he knows it is impossible for him (or us) to know whether his conclusion is truly correct. A brilliantly complex, multi-layered script such as this requires a strong director to bring it to life successfully, and in this capacity, Portman proves herself to be a true virtuoso. She and editors Andrew Mondshein and Hervé Schneid create scenes that linger, giving her audiences time to reflect and absorb the content and the beauty of the images. Portman also makes scenes of violence more effective by avoiding the gore and focusing on the human cost. In just a few brief scenes, she manages to convey the truly terrible cost of the birth of Israel, with one of the most gut-wrenching moments in the film occurring with the actor off-camera, and another occurring while we listen to Fania grieving over the loss of a friend. Of course, Portman manages to get excellent performances from all of the actors (including herself), but she also knows how to manage the visual content of a film to enhance her ability to communicate with the audience. She has an eye for composition that makes even scenes of squalor look eerily beautiful, and she knows how to communicate what is most important in each scene. She and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak use a dazzling array of visual techniques to convey the meaning of the story, such as adjusting the color saturation to make the storytelling sequences more vibrant than reality. They also create an intriguing blend of realistic, surrealistic, and symbolic images. For example, during one of the storytelling sequences, they present a stunning image of black birds filling up a white sky to create an image similar to an M.C. Escher lithograph. Another memorable example was a lingering visual of Fania's out-of-focus head that turns and suddenly comes into focus. The script, the acting, and the visual presentation are deftly managed by Portman to create a completely draining emotional experience for the audience. To cap it off, the music by Nicholas Britell is hauntingly effective at conveying the mood of the story. This film is an unusual work of art that should be viewed with an open mind and judged for what it is, not for what you think it should be. If you are excited by the prospect of seeing a well-made, challenging, artistic film that is densely populated with metaphors and symbolism – a complex film that challenges you to try to understand another person's understanding of yet another person's psychology – then this film is an absolute "must see."

lucasnochez "It's better to be sensitive than to be honest". It is no surprise that first time writer/director Natalie Portman is taking a Pro-Jewish stance in her newest film A Tale of Love and Darkness. A celebrated novel by one of, if not the most prolific novelists hailing from Israel, Amos Oz; a last name that literally translates to "hope" in Hebrew. Oz is a novelist whose book serves as a large and hopeful story towards conflict flooding the Middle East. Sadly for Portman, whose keen eye and collaboration with many talented directors, has allowed her to visually over-stylize her film with beauty and tones of dark and tragically elegant glimpses, without much of a handle on narrative and storytelling. A Tale of Love and Darkness is more dark than it is loving; seemingly with all but mere glimmers of hope for its small group of main characters. As the film begins, we are aware that an older Oz is telling a story, his story more specifically, essentially providing a voice-over for his novel. Narrating his words and recounting his childhood years after the Second World War, during a time Israel is under British mandate, a young Oz navigates a barren and soulless country while the politics and ramifications of war break down all around him. His only salvation are his zestful mother and realistic father. His mother Fania (Portman) and father Arieh (Gilad Kahana) are not wealthy. Ariel is an aspiring writer and librarian, Fania, a dedicated housewife who we understand leaves a life of wealth for love and motherhood, is a dreamer. Although she always imagined marrying a rebel/poet/farmer, Fania's expectations are always challenged against her realities.The illusions and aphorisms within Fania's head are all stories of dread, drearily setting the tone for the mentality of many people during this time. It is when Fania begins her monologues about these parables that Portman's direction was at its strongest. Perhaps highly lit and stylized to their full potential, these stories provided audiences with a very real and optimistic promise of resolution and sometimes painful acceptance of war and conflict, yet so elegantly presented. Luckily, these stories account for a hefty portion of the film and drive the not-so-long runtime through smoothly.There is no surprise that throughout the course of Portman's adaptation of Darkness, Oz is fully in love with his mother and her relentless attitude. Portman's cinematic take on the novel sadly disconnects her audience from the deep relationship between a young Oz and his living and loving mother Fania. Plagued with sleepy fade outs, incoherent scenes developing a young Oz and a highly depressed Fania, mixed with a blend of illustrious illusions and parables, pushed with a dash of Arieh's involvement with the family, Darkness is a dimly lit tragedy filled with hardly any love and mostly resent. Much like her character Fania, the light that so easily gleamed from her eyes and into the lives of other characters surrounding her, Fania's light slowly fades, bulldozing her character into a state of depression.Portman is a dynamic actress with a very strong political voice when it comes to many of the conflicts happening in the Middle East today. As a recent Oscar winner and Harvard graduate with an articulate and respectable celebrity presence, it is difficult to imagine many critics and film reviewers giving scathing reviews for a piece of work that isn't all that good. Portman's efforts behind and in front of the camera are very admirable; her promise as a director is highly confident and most of all, her content is riveting, just not in this film.Darkness is a film that toys with the failed promises of youth, speaks in a cocky and overstuffed tone of ethereal Hebrew that fails to connect its audience to the words and highly complex fantasies running through Oz's and Fania's head. Poetic, tragic, benign with its potential perspective to show a very unbiased side of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Portman's feature directorial and writing debut is a tale of much promise.Portman may have tried to show the most innocent and bare examples of the conflict through scenes between children; one involving a dangerous swing, another involving children in a school playground. As such it is no surprise that the new director succeeds at very basic and simple action/reaction scenes. Sadly however, while Darkness comes to a conclusion, Oz's redemption from childhood to youth is never really seen or appreciated. Instead, audiences are left with a handsome and enlightened youth whose promise as an affective and politically conscious presence is spoiled in the beginning scenes of an older and wiser voice-over character. Editing is surely not one of Darkness' strong suits.Portman is keen on showing that violence and conflict have no age limits or boundaries; it is unwavering and unkind to gender and race. Wholeheartedly, A Tale of Love and Darkness attempts to show us the light. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the lights always seem to be turned off.