bob-march Gorgeously filmed, but that's all. Middling performances, and a screenplay that sinks the musicality of Gibbon's Scottish prose in a mire of pedestrian modern clichés.

gsandra614 This movie is the most artistically excellent film I've ever seen. The frames in this movie could be stopped and transferred to oil on canvas and mounted in an art museum. The photography was flawless as were the performances. (My one criticism was Ewan's total change of personality when he came home on furlough. You'd think he would be eager to be with his loving wife -- but he went off his head and raped her. Their idyllic life was torn apart.)Also -- who was that twit in the pulpit pushing political coercion and calling young farmers "cowards" if they didn't enlist? So much for separation of church and state.This movie was lovingly photographed. It made me want to move to Scotland.

Adrian Bain Having voice-over narration throughout the film vastly reduced the visual storytelling expected of film, instead of having it revealed visually and with minimum exposition through dialogue. So much was on-the-nose exposition. As a result, it was tedious to watch. I forced myself to finish the film, just in case it improved - it didn't.I was rarely drawn emotionally into the story, but felt more like a bystander stood next to the film crews during rehearsals. There seemed to be a different emotional feel between internal and external scenes, and I wonder how the choice to shoot digitally and film for internal and external scenes affected this, albeit subconsciously.It was confusing that the narrator sounded like the same person as the lead female actor, but referred to that character by their name, as though it wasn't them.The screenplay adapted from a novel had not been condensed suitably for the limited time available for a film, and seemed to have instead crammed in as many events as possible from the book, and so not leaving enough time to explore any of them to any emotional depth.

Raven-1969 Firelight, swells of the North Sea, hayfields, rain, a wedding dinner by candlelight, mist, the morning sun, green mountains, Scottish song, clothing fashions from a hundred years ago and the writing of Lewis Grassic Gibbon, are brought to life. It is said that nothing but the land endures, yet there is something about each of these characters – good and bad - that endures too. Intriguing characters include a sensual, pretty and bright young woman who loves the landscape and dreams of a better life, a strict and abusive farm family patriarch in desperate need of an intervention and anger management classes, and a young man turned bitter and cowardly by war and violence. The story is told mostly through the eyes of the young woman, Chris, as she grows and experiences hardships as well as bliss. It is amazing to witness her transformations through the people she comes in contact with, the land and the emotions she feels. Kindness, love, nature and light endure when we let them. Anger, violence and hatred make them the lovelier for that.The director is obviously extremely experienced and capable at such historic United Kingdom stories. He invigorates the senses in sight and sound, and we even almost feel the emotions of the characters and smell the hay, mist and mud. I suppose this is the "memory realism" style I read about. Remarkably, and appropriately to the themes of the story, Davies does not shy away from the rawness of anger, sex, nudity and violence. He is equally adept at bringing out the beauty of the story as well as its darkness. There is exemplary acting here especially by the leads, yet with the exception of the one who played Ewan (each of his moods seemed the same to me). For those few who can differentiate between the sectors of Scotland, the film takes place in Northeast Scotland. The excitement of another "Florida premiere" was palpable (LOL!) at this 2016 Miami International Film Festival screening.