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75
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Sometimes you are either open to a movie, or closed. If you're convinced that An Unfinished Life is damaged goods, how can it begin its work on you?
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75
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USA Today Claudia Puig
Poignant and well-acted, it offers heartfelt moments leavened by subtle humor.
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63
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Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Everything about An Unfinished Life's screenplay is cliched and predictable, but the actors manage to elevate the proceedings above and beyond shameless soap.
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50
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Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
It's an acceptable film, but the story of family ties and forgiveness simply cannot manage the emotional connections it is desperate for.
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50
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San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
A perfectly OK drama, with a good cast and many good scenes, but it suffers from the usual maladies that films get when they've been out on the ranch too long: all-too-obvious symbolism and a serious case of the longueurs.
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50
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Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Like most of Hallström's Hollywood movies ("The Cider House Rules," "Chocolat"), this one is excruciatingly tasteful.
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38
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Rolling Stone Peter Travers
It's not just that Jennifer Lopez looks lost and out of her league acting with Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman. That's to be expected. It's the drag-ass solemnity of this turgid family drama that makes you crazy.
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33
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Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
An Unfinished Life is inert, kaput -- a middlebrow mush of platitudes rather than an okay corral of distinct characters with heartbeats. It's awful not in an exciting, uncontrolled way but in an overly controlled, narcotized way.
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30
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The New York Times Stephen Holden
Solemn, sentimental bore of a movie that suffocates in its own predictability and watered-down psychobabble.
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30
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Washington Post Desson Thomson
This unusual convergence of stars doesn't amount to much.
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