Harrison's Flowers

Universal Pictures | Release Date: March 15, 2002

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

49	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 31 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

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Lawrence Toppman

MacDowell gives an uneven performance, as she often does, but Strathairn is ideally cast as the conflicted husband. Read full review

Glenn Whipp

It's that very savagery -- not its love-can-conquer-all theme -- that makes Harrison's Flowers worth picking. Read full review

James Berardinelli

At its heart, Harrison's Flowers is a love story, albeit a graphic and difficult one. Read full review

Steven Rea

MacDowell brings an absolutely riveting conviction to her role. She's strong stuff in a movie that is likewise gripping and powerful. Read full review

Loren King

A powerful portrait of modern journalism and the nobility -- and futility -- of chronicling modern war. Read full review

Loren King

A powerhouse of a film about modern journalism and war, with battle scenes that have the immediacy and impact of the famed opening sequence of "Saving Private Ryan." Read full review

Desson Thomson

The movie's still a solid "B," a workmanlike drama. Read full review

David Rooney

Provides powerful drama thanks to its trenchant core story and harrowing re-creation of the brutal chaos of war. Read full review

William Arnold

It's a chillingly cautionary tale. Less an anti-war than a pro-order film, it tells us that the veneer of civilization is paper thin. Read full review

Marc Savlov

Doesn't say much of anything at all about the Balkan conflict -- it's more concerned with MacDowell's shattered face and Brody's passionate, paranoid whinny, which, come to think of it, is just good enough. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

A chintzy melodrama gussied up as hair-trigger combat ''reality,'' but there's no denying the vividness with which the French cowriter-director Elie Chouraqui has visualized the chaos of Croatia. Read full review

Claudia Puig

As far-fetched as it sometimes seems, the film resonates in the wake of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Read full review

Chris Kaltenbach

Gets the hell of war right and struggles to depict the unyielding passion of love. But the two sides make for an uneasy mix, one that not even the actors seem comfortable with.

Jami Bernard

The movie does have one very perplexing major flaw. It throws in some minor-character narration toward the end, as if test audiences had lost their ability to concentrate, and this was the filmmaker's only solution for getting us back on track.

Roger Ebert

The movie exhibits the usual indifference to the issues involved. Although it was written and directed by Elie Chouraqui, a Frenchman, it is comfortably xenophobic. Most Americans have never understood the differences among Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, and this film is no help. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh

Making such a tragedy the backdrop to a love story risks trivializing it, though Chouraqui no doubt intended the film to affirm love's power to help people endure almost unimaginable horror. Read full review

Scott Tobias

Moves forward on the conviction of its performances. Brody, in particular, shows uncommon sensitivity as a politically committed and temperamental photographer who responds to MacDowell's half-crazed resolution with heartbreaking zeal. Read full review

New Times (L.A.)Gregory Weinkauf

The story's a trifle, but it's consistently edgy as the team stride straight into the middle of grisly violence so they can capture it on film.

Jonathan Rosenbaum

It's ultimately a losing battle when the audience's lack of interest in eastern Europeans is assumed at the outset. Read full review

David Sterritt

The movie makes a commendable effort to celebrate bravery and underscore the terrors of war, but its melodramatic approach is more spectacular than insightful. Read full review

A bizarre and flawed movie. It serves up the 1991 siege of Vukovar with a crazed Balkan bloodthirstiness that is shocking and sickening to watch, far beyond anything usually seen in an American movie. Read full review

Lou Lumenick

Suddenly topical because of parallels to the kidnapping and death of Daniel Pearl. Read full review

Edward Guthmann

Melodramatic take on love and war. Read full review

Manohla Dargis

A premise so patently absurd, so implausible, they might as well have pitched it to the Oxygen channel. Read full review

Joe Morgenstern

What's strong and true in Harrison's Flowers -- the hideous chaos of war, the stirring heroism of photographers and journalists -- falls victim to what's familiar, melodramatic and false.

Peter Travers

Director Elie Chouraqui, who co-wrote the script, catches the chaotic horror of war, but why bother if you're going to subjugate truth to the tear-jerking demands of soap opera? Read full review

Jessica Winter

A discombobulating mix of blood-and-grit docu-realism and moony multiplex contrivance. Read full review

Kevin Thomas

Leaves us with a heightened appreciation of the bold and personal films made by a number of filmmakers of the former Yugoslavia. Read full review

Stephen Hunter

It's part travelogue in Hell, part ineffectual weepie. Read full review

Andrew O'Hehir

The fact that its sound and photography are gracefully crafted, or that fragments of a tolerable film are visible here and there, only makes its dumb-ass, romance-novel version of tragedy worse. This is one of the most badly botched mainstream movies I've seen in years. Read full review

A.O. Scott

A stupefying mix of action, politics and melodrama. Read full review