50
Cult New Zealand director Vincent Ward (THE NAVIGATOR) pushes perhaps a little too hard for popularity with this oddly truncated, though engrossing, epic.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
A marvelous breakthrough, a film of incantatory intensity and moment by a prodigiously gifted young filmmaker.
70
The New York Times by Janet Maslin
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.
89
Austin Chronicle by Marc Savlov
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.
90
Los Angeles Times by Michael Wilmington
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.
100
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
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.