Istvan Szabo's "Sunshine" aspires to be an epic, but it doesn't have the ideas to support its epic length.
It's a decent enough movie, and Ralph Fiennes gives a characteristically good performance in a monster-sized role, but the subject matter (which covers family strife, revolutions, war and the Holocaust) gives the movie an aura of importance that it doesn't deserve. What Szabo has given us more than anything else is a grand soap opera, a kind of modern-day "Doctor Zhivago." Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's not a movie that screams classic.
Grade: B+
It's a decent enough movie, and Ralph Fiennes gives a characteristically good performance in a monster-sized role, but the subject matter (which covers family strife, revolutions, war and the Holocaust) gives the movie an aura of importance that it doesn't deserve. What Szabo has given us more than anything else is a grand soap opera, a kind of modern-day "Doctor Zhivago." Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's not a movie that screams classic.
Grade: B+