A Tale of Love and Darkness (2015)

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

This film is truly beautiful. I was hesitant to see this film. I thought it was going to be a love song to the Jewish struggle in Jerusalem, but it was not very political at all. It does include the pure optimism of the Jewish people once they are given their own free state. There is also some beautiful narration describing the conflict as unfortunate and tragic. Instead, we are given a beautiful film of the personal story of a boy's relationship with his loving, troubled mother. She tells him different stories throughout the film, each one containing its own seed of wisdom. I was really impressed with the beauty of the dialogue. This is a film that can appeal to people who love language, but the beauty of each shot is also one of its strengths. A very unique film, filled with beauty and darkness (and love).

Natali Portman directed the movie A tale of Love and Darkness centered around a husband, wife and son in Jerusalem. Natalie Portman played the role of Fanna Oz , the wife who is happy to be with her husband and son. Fanna depends on her son's innocence to make her life happy. Fanna has a tendency to go into depressed moods. Though she has borne a son , her mind goes back to her lover's face and she , a mother, suffers from severe depression. The son, Amos Oz played very well by Amir Tessler , watches his mother sitting in a trance, oblivious of his presence. Amos watches and listens to his mother grappling with depression and encouraging her husband who is Amos father to have relationships outside their marriage. Amos sees his dad sharing loving moments with his mom and then watches dad sharing affectionate moments with a total stranger in a cafe. Natalie Portman , plays the role of a depressed woman , very well. the movie needed editing. Some scenes were too long without any substance. The movie is only for 95 minutes (much shorter than Angelina Jolie's directed movie Unbroken 137 minutes). Too long.

Plot was all over the place, (if you can even call it a plot).This is just a vanity project for Natalie Portman. A very bad one at that.It's the film equivalent of miley cyrus "dead petz" project.Both Artists wrote, acted, and direct their own project, but just because a artist has complete creative control doesn't mean it will be good. Her acting is was very null in this. I can't recommend this movie simply because of all the mistakes and bad editing. Do yourself a favor and watch a REAL biography, not some self- indulgent project by a bratty elitist.

The movie is beautiful and sometimes quite self-conscious about it, settling into a sequence of many set pieces each of which seems to make a point of its own until remembering them all (to see how they're relevant later on) becomes quite a chore, at least for a bear of little brain like me. There is not much dramatic impetus driving the film along, except that at one point the War of Independence carries the action with its start, middle, and end. What keeps the audience in its seat is more the poetry of the visuals and the thoughtfulness of the text than any great tension or suspense from moment to moment.A juvenile actor in a major role is always a challenge. In this case, the kid certainly doesn't spoil the movie, but he doesn't make the scenes his own either. His looks don't proclaim him to be the naive and sensitive outsider he's supposed to be; in fact his looks aren't distinctive at all, and a single child actor is used for too many years of plot. (At the start he's behaving too much younger than he looks.)The narrator explains in retrospect that the Arabs and Jews of Palestine would have got along fine if only they had understood they were all fellow victims of Europe. The proposition is questionable in the light of the current war of civilizations, but coming from writer Amos Oz it is a mercifully mild example of his kooky politics and we're lucky the film contains nothing worse. Natalie Portman was allowed to make Oz' book into a melancholy elegy that resembles a walk through a beautiful but exhaustingly large museum. Item after item. "It was nice," I said to my wife afterward. "It was, but toward the end I was just waiting for it to finish," she replied.