Eternity and a Day

Somber, meditative and visually magnificent, this film, about a famous Greek author ruminating on his past, is a piece of cinematic poetry: calm, beautiful and chilling as the eternal sea against which much of it is set. [22 Oct 1998, p.2]

Working with cinematographers Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos and composer Eleni Karaindrou, whose beautiful and stirring score greatly reinforces the film's impact, Angelopoulos has created another masterpiece, one that recalls such classics as Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Kurosawa's Ikiru (To Live). [28 May 1999, p.F6]

Although Angelopoulos' film is not for all viewers, it rewards the patient moviegoer with an incomparable emotional journey. [09 Jul 1999, p.04]

Eternity And A Day occasionally lapses into navel-gazing ennui, and Ganz's reluctant kinship with the adorable moppet courts cliché, but Angelopoulos strings together so many haunting, exquisitely choreographed sequences that even his worst ideas are emotionally resonant. Read full review

This rambling but beautiful feature by Theo Angelopoulos may seem like an anthology of 60s and 70s European art cinema: family nostalgia from Bergman and seaside frolics from Fellini; long, mesmerizing choreographed takes and camera movements from Jancso and Tarkovsky; haunting expressionist moods and visions from Antonioni. Read full review

A characteristically elegant, eloquent and idiosyncratic meditation on the relationships between personal and political histories, and between life and art. Read full review

A profound meditation on time and mortality, this is probably the most celebrated of the filmmaker’s work and a hypnotically executed piece of cinema. Read full review

All things being relative, this is a dreamy, lulling film but also a more concise and straightforward one than the magnificently grandiose Ulysses' Gaze, the Angelopoulos opus that directly preceded it. Read full review

Eternity and a Day finds Angelopoulos refining his themes and style. Just as other great filmmakers have in the past explored similar themes time and again, so Angelopoulos has evolved and come up with one of his most lucid and emotional journeys thus far. Read full review

A superbly realised picture which moves with the power and the gigantic, deliberative slowness of a wartime North Sea convoy. [14 May 1999, p.107]

This is softer, more emotional and in some ways, more obvious, than Angelopoulos's other work, yet it has a memorable, moving grandeur. [11 Jun 1999, p.13]

This is not a masterpiece, but it contains moments of rare beauty and its contemplation of life, death, regret, and memory has a subtle power. Read full review

Angelopoulos returns to the same poetic terrain he explored in Ulysses' Gaze and Landscape in the Mist. In place of "action" and conventional narration, Eternity deals in philosophical ruminations, slippery shifts in time and long, hypnotic tracking shots that seem to whisper to us, "Slow down, observe. Listen." Read full review

Death doesn't knock in Theo Angelopoulos' Eternity and a Day; it raps softly, sitting patiently in the waiting room of its terminally ill poet's life until he's ready to let it in. Read full review

Angelopoulos' leisurely pace and trademark long takes add up to a film guaranteed to please filmmakers nostalgic for the bygone glory days of European cinema. Read full review

Angelopoulos remains faithful to his oeurve with Eternity and a Day. A slow journey through remembrance and repentance, the film's haunting message is told with a transcendent trickery that blends past and present into single scenes. [18 Jun 1999]

It's poetic, resonant, wistful, convulsive, regretful, exultant. There also are times when it's demanding to sit through, when time passes slowly, urged on only by flickers of uncertainty on the face of its protagonist, or by his insistent peering after meanings that may not even exist. But it's also a film that offers the kinds of rewards possible only to the contemplative mindset. [25 Jun 1999, p.D5]

Eternity and a Day is a graceful, elegiac, humourless film, a poetical work that invites you to fall in with its meditative pace. [16 May 1999, p.6]

If you can tune into its somber, hypnotic wavelength, you may be surprised at the raw emotional impact it delivers in key scenes, and at its ability to provoke your imagination long afterward. Read full review

Angelopoulos paints the screen with appealing images, but the story and acting lack the special charge that might have lifted this drama to the high level of his greatest work. [28 May 1999, p.14]

There are moments here and there with potentially eloquent points of departure, but they dissolve in the mists of the director's ultimately aimless estheticism. [21 May 1999]