Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

This film deals purely with human emotion.And director did this in a heart touching way. A boy in search for his father with an old lady who is not related to him. The most beautiful and sincere movies i watched in 2017. A Must watch for those who are interested in movies portraying helpless human in various turns of life.

Central Station has a great virtue - after you see it, it becomes a part from yourself. it sounds strange but it is more than a film. it is just an experience. simple, seductive, touching, realistic, discovering social isles, powerful feelings, inventing, in cruel honest manner, a world having the axis a not ordinary friendship. Fernanda Montenegro and Vinicius de Oliveira. this is all. a station and its letters, a meet and a long and special trip as start to define yourself. the film is one of the most impressive examples of the talent of Fernanda Montenegro.her Dora is far to be a model. but only a fascinating character who start as embroidery of expectations, frustrations, fear and need of comfort. more than a story, the film propose an admirable, useful parable. and a good support to reflect about every day experiences. at the first sigh.

Known in English as "Central Station," this is an inconsistent film with a flawed premise. This is the first film in many a year that I watched because I had to rather than because I wanted to as it was assigned viewing for a Law and Film group of which I am a member. It is not the kind of film that I would ordinarily choose to watch as it is rather depressing in spite of its would-be moving moments. The script by Walter Salles can never seem to decide on a tone and, at the end of the day, I didn't care what happened to the characters, which is never a good sign. On the bright side, the film looks great and it was interesting to watch my first film in Portugeuse - and only my second entirely in a language other than English or German - but I wish that my introduction to Brazilian cinema had been more successful.Fernanda Montenegro is very good in the Oscar nominated role of Isadora "Dora" Teixeira and it is a shame that the film could not have been on the same level as her performance. A cynical, bitter retired teacher, she writes letters for illiterate people at the major Rio de Janiero train station Central do Brasil. Half the time, she does not even send the letters, either tearing them up or sticking them in a door which her friend Irene compares to Purgatory. After one of her customers, a woman named Ana Fontenele, is knocked down by a bus, she takes in her son Josué Fontenele de Paiva but it is not out of the goodness of her heart. She sells him to child traffickers for $1,000, which she then uses to buy a new TV. Dora is an intelligent, well-educated, perceptive woman so I find it very hard to believe that it had never occurred to her that he would be killed and his organs would be sold until Irene points it out to her. She then experiences a crisis of conscience and steals him away from the dreadful place where she sent him in the first place. The film is concerned with her supposed redemption but it did not work for me because I don't think that she could be redeemed after that.In order for me to find a character interesting, they have to be either sympathetic or compelling and, unfortunately, Dora was neither one. I don't have a problem with characters doing terrible things if the storyline is gripping or, far less often, if it is able to redeem them. For instance, I was fascinated by Judah Rosenthal's existential moral crisis after he became heavily involved in a murder in "Crimes and Misdemeanors", which I watched only last week, and Michael Corleone's gradual descent into darkness in the first two "Godfather" films is a beautifully told, engrossing story. The problem with this film is that I don't think anything that Dora did or perhaps even could go any way towards redeeming her. She clearly regretted it, which is something, but I think that committing the act was unforgivable and there is no way back from that. I had much the same problem with "The Godfather Part III" actually but that was far from its only flaw.Because of this, I did not find Dora's bond with Josué - who is played by the rather bad child actor Vinícius de Oliveira - very sweet or believable as I was presumably supposed to. Frankly, I could not get the child trafficking thing out of my head for a single second during the film. She warms to him and does admittedly become a better person as the film progresses but it can't erase what happened earlier. She embarks on a trip across Brazil with Josué, albeit trying to abandon him several times along the way, so that he can find his father Jesus, a shiftless drunk who beat his mother while she was pregnant with him. Is this really all the poor child has going for him? He eventually finds his half-brothers, who are nice enough, but it is heavily implied that his father will never return in spite of a letter to the contrary. This is for the best as Josué might be able to actually experience real happiness, something which I certainly didn't while watching this film. Besides Montenagro, Marília Pêra, who sadly died in December, as Irene is the only actor who particularly stood out. Overall, the film hinges on being able to forgive Dora, which is a flawed premise in my view, so it did not do much for me, I'm afraid.

I approached this film thinking it would put me to sleep within 30 minutes or less. I already had "U571" in the back burner, just in case. I expected "Central Station" to be too touchy-feely. Either that or too graphically realistic about things I already hear and see everyday here in Rio. Normally I get my entertainment from Hollywood blockbusters like "Avengers" - which takes me far away from reality - or comedies like "A Million Ways to Die in the West", so I really went against my cinematic instincts on this one. I was pleasantly surprised to be proved wrong and prejudiced about "Central do Brasil" (Central Station). The film kept me very riveted to my couch, eyes wide open, wanting to see what was going to happen at every turn. The narrative begins with some very impacting scenes and situations and then turns into a heartwarming, involving and captivating story. You really get in touch with the characters and their afflictions. Great movie. You won't be disappointed.