Golden Door
Miramax Films | Release Date: May 25, 2007 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
74
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 22 Critic Reviews
Positive:
18
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
TV Guide MagazineKen Fox
Sicilian-born filmmaker Emanuele Crialese takes a huge leap forward from his pretty but simplistic "Respiro" with this highly original, startlingly beautiful and emotionally resonant film. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeWesley Morris
It's so hypnotically breathtaking, you don't realize you're not breathing. By the final shot, you don't realize you're crying either, but there go the tears. Read full review
100
Seattle Post-IntelligencerSean Axmaker
The familiar majesty of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline is replaced with anticipation and imagination. The sense of hope and wonder is the greater for it, and the sense of promise glows from the screen. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael Wilmington
Called "Nuovomondo" in its native Italy, it's bittersweet, neither as comic and sentimental as Charlie Chaplin's 1917 great silent comedy "The Immigrant," nor as cynical and epic as Elia Kazan's 1963 "America, America," but close to both. Read full review
88
Philadelphia InquirerSteven Rea
The Golden Door feels, at points, like a silent film - a silent film with CinemaScope vistas and dazzling, saturated color. Read full review
88
Miami HeraldPeter Debruge
Virtually everything Americans know about Ellis Island they've learned from the movies, and virtually all those movies were American. Golden Door offers the other side of the story, the one that ends at Ellis Island instead of beginning there. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
The greatness of Golden Door is its tone; sympathetic but always wry. Read full review
80
VarietyJay Weissberg
An imaginative, intelligent and attractive Italo pic precisely when the country needs it most, Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door reps a solid piece of cinema that neither panders nor preaches. Read full review
80
Village VoiceJean Oppenheimer
With dialogue kept to a minimum, cinematographer Agnés Godard confirms her status as one of the most extraordinary visual artists working today. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
After countless films in which immigration plays a central role -- one of the earliest was Charlie Chaplin's 1917 silent classic "The Immigrant" while one of the best, Jan Troell's "The Emigrants," has never migrated to DVD -- you'd think the canon was essentially complete. Yet this visionary work adds to it by combining harsh realities with magic-realist fantasies. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. Scott
What makes Mr. Crialese's telling unusual, apart from the gorgeousness of his wide-screen compositions, is that his emphasis is on departure and transition, rather than arrival. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesCarina Chocano
Beautiful, spacey, trans-oceanic odyssey. Read full review
80
Washington PostAnn Hornaday
Writ small, Golden Door is an absorbing and moving love story; writ large, it's the story we've never stopped telling ourselves. Read full review
80
Chicago ReaderJ.R. Jones
Italian writer-director Emanuele Crialese is best known for the art-house piffle "Respiro" (2002), a sun-kissed fairy tale that didn't prepare me for the weight and solidity of this historical drama about a Sicilian peasant family immigrating to the U.S. Read full review
75
New York PostV.A. Musetto
The acting is superb, especially the always alluring Charlotte Gainsbourg as a mysterious Englishwoman taking the ship to America. Agnes Godard's lensing is painterly, and Crialese's direction is seamless. Read full review
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
Historians at Ellis Island estimate nearly half of all Americans had at least one ancestor pass through there between 1892 and 1954. Read full review
67
Baltimore SunMichael Sragow
Journey is weary, yet imaginative. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Liam Lacey
As lovely to look at as it is dramatically inert. Read full review
58
Christian Science MonitorPeter Rainer
Draggy Italian epic that's big on production values but skimpy on inspiration. Read full review
50
Entertainment WeeklyGregory Kirschling
A sluggish procedural on what it was like to make the journey to Ellis Island back in the day. Read full review
50
New York Daily NewsJack Mathews
The movie never really comes alive, and Crialese's coyness with Lucy's character is more frustrating than mysterious. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarc Savlov
Despite the hardships depicted, Golden Door is a sweet film at heart, playing witness to the birth pangs of modern America with both due respect and the occasional comic grace note, but not, oddly, one single shot of the Statue of Liberty. Read full review
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