The Life Before Her Eyes (2008)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Load of rubbish!!

Absolutely Brilliant!

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I rarely watch movies so for me to take time out to even comment means something. Last night I was channel surfing and happened upon the title of the movie. I went ahead and auto tuned it as it read interesting. Interesting is NOT a strong enough word. This is one of the best movies I have ever seen. The shots are stunning,the acting is superb, and the way it was put together was absolutely brilliant. It kept me fully engaged where most movies bore me within minutes (which is why I watch so few).I was fully enthralled from beginning to end. If you enjoy movies that make you ask yourself questions, where everything isn't handed to you on a silver platter, I highly recommend this movie. Perfect movie for minds that love to think!

This film is a beautiful and lyrical meditation of what could have been. What if things would have happened differently? The Life before her Eyes is the second film from director Vadim Perelman, whose first film The House of Sand and Fog brought wide critical praise. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including best lead actor for Ben Kingsley.The Life Before her Eyes stars Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Wood playing the same character of Diana. As a teenager (Wood) she is a free spirited girl who is caught in an unthinkable situation. When a boy at school goes on a shooting rampage she and her best friend become trapped in the bathroom with him. The story then flashes forward and we see Diana all grown up with a husband and a young daughter. She is continually haunted by the events of that day and the kind of person she was back then. She tries to protect and nurture her daughter onto a better path but she looks to be failing. Her husband is a professor at a local college and could be having and affair.The plot swaps back a fourth between the young Diana and her best friend Maureen, played by Ava Amurri and the older Diana and her family. It chronicles the building of young girls' friendship and how they have arrived to the point when they are facing down the gunman. While Maureen is religious and chaste, Diana is quite liberal and currently seeing an older man. They are complete opposite personalities, but as friends they were made for each other.The movie is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted. As far as casting goes even though Evan and Uma have similar looking faces, their body types are quite different. The time lines of events for Diana are also a bit sketchy. There is a big twist ending that is a quite debatable and could turn some people against this movie. It could also explain some of the inconsistencies. It deals with some pretty heavy issues to the point of being overstuffed, but it is a good experience overall. The DVD contains many special features including a director's commentary.

Earnest, manipulative, dull, horrible, cheap, lazy, trite, exploitative, shameful, feeble. This kind of toxic nonsense is the equivalent of narrative granola laced with Prozac and arsenic. The last time I felt this aggrieved by the egregious nonsense being peddled by writers and filmmakers was after a viewing of "Sliding Doors" when I encountered two teenage girls in tears at the death of so many real and imagined babies in that movie. Needless to say those girls thought "Sliding Doors" as wonderful a movie as most reviewers here seem to imagine "The Life Before Her Eyes" to be. I can't imagine what Uma Thurman imagined she was doing getting involved in this nonsense. Next time she wants to elicit an equivalent response from an audience all she needs to do is have some kittens die on her. She doesn't even have to throw in the rain sequences or the crushed flower trope. The worst thing about this movie - viewed belatedly on TV - is to have my new year so soiled by the experience that I've felt compelled to come on here and vent in the manner of some bitter teen. Come to think of it, maybe the Michael character had to sit through an equivalent movie before he was compelled to act. Truly awful.

Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, "The Life Before Her Eyes" is a melancholic tale of a woman who survives a horrific, Columbine-type massacre while in high school, only to be haunted by the experience for the rest of her life.Half of the film focuses on her life today, fifteen years after the event, as Diana struggles to be a good wife and mother amid painful memories she is unable to put behind her; the other half recounts the days leading up to and including the tragic event, when she was basically just a typical rebellious teen, uninterested in school and chafing against life in a small town, dreaming of the day when she would be able to move on to bigger and better things, unaware, as we all are, of just how easily our lives and dreams can be shattered at a moment's notice.Screenwriter Emil Stern flows seamlessly back and forth between the two time periods, providing a spellbinding look at the devastating effect trauma and survivor's guilt can have on the human psyche, the permanent damage they can cause. You'll have to decide for yourself whether the "Carnival of Souls"/"Sixth Sense" –type ending works or not (I happen to think it does), but either way, this is an incisive and thought-provoking work that can be interpreted on many levels. (It also explains why the Zombies' "She's Not There" seems to be playing every time someone turns on a radio).Uma Thurman portrays Diana as she is today, while Evan Rachel Ward plays her as a restless teen, and both are excellent, as is Eva Amurri as her best friend in school. Vadim ("The House of Sand and Fog") Perelman's direction is artful, lyrical and hypnotic, and James Horner's haunting score sets just the right tone for this strange little mood piece that will have you thinking long and hard about your own life and the importance of living in the moment.