Map of the Human Heart

One of the best qualities of Map of the Human Heart was that I never quite knew where it was going. It is a love story, a war story, a lifetime story, but it manages to traverse all of that familiar terrain without doing the anticipated. Read full review

A marvelous breakthrough, a film of incantatory intensity and moment by a prodigiously gifted young filmmaker. Read full review

It may overwhelm and confuse, until you start tracing the mesmerizing route Ward lays out for his audience. [14 May 1993, p.6]

Map of the Human Heart is a lyrical, gorgeously photographed epic as well as a captivating story of love. Occasionally, its reach exceeds its grasp, but how exciting and rare to see a movie that takes too many chances in an era when most take none at all.

Ward's "Map" is a wildly ambitious film and, often, a wildly beautiful one--and if it isn't quite a masterpiece, if we sense that Ward's resources aren't enough for the World War II London scenes, in the end, any flaws or lapses simply may not matter. Movies, especially ones with a broad epic canvas and international logistics, don't often get this intimate. They don't give you such a sense of nerves stripped raw, joy or misery nakedly expressed. Read full review

This lovely, tentative motion picture tells a captivating tale. [14 May 1993, p.19]

Spanning three decades, Map of the Human Heart is one of those rare films that illuminates a single human story, and does it so well that you're hardly aware you're watching a movie. Read full review

An immensely ambitious and audacious love story spanning 30 years and two continents. Read full review

Fate intervenes at an indecent rate, serving up plenty of misunderstandings, but the mise-en-scène is stunning. Go with the floe. Read full review

Far more memorable for the spectacular wildness of its Arctic and Dresden scenes (as photographed by Eduardo Serra) than for its uneven efforts to bind such images together. Read full review

Ward's ambitions for this project far outstripped the intentions and capacities of its screenplay. Read full review

There's power in this story, even if much of it does owe to a greatly sentimentalized time rather than to genuine virtue. In its new, leaner version, Ward's film does seem twitchy at times -- we're not always sure how the characters got to where they are, emotionally or physically. But it's sweet, too. [14 May 1993, p.G4]

A perplexing movie. Wonderful to look at, delightful to behold, but when the plot breaks open the insides turn out be mold. [14 May 1993, p.21]

Scott Lee gives a surprisingly strong performance as the Inuit who falls in unrequited love with Albertine. If you can overcome the almost-too-coincidental fact that they are assigned to the same Air base several years later allowing them to be together again then this pleasing romantic drama could just be for you. Read full review

Cult New Zealand director Vincent Ward (THE NAVIGATOR) pushes perhaps a little too hard for popularity with this oddly truncated, though engrossing, epic. Read full review

But at heart, the terrain mapped by Map of the Human Heart is emotionally shameless; it's a forties movie tossed into the nineties. It should find a lot of fans. [14 May 1993]

Unfocused, condescending, and corny. Read full review

Made mostly by white people, it's a film largely about how awful white people are -- just the kind of thing many white viewers will love and consider important. But however you might feel about this kind of movie, Map of the Human Heart is fake merchandise, an unfelt, boring travelogue that covers itself in its anti-racist, anti-war message and then dares audiences to notice its barrenness at the core. [14 May 1993, p.C6]