A Disappointing Continuation

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.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

From a production standpoint Head in the Clouds is impressive. Not many Canadian films this expensive get made (simply BECAUSE they are expensive) Top credit goes to the make-up, costume and art departments, as well as the cinematographer. Nothing in the frame needs an upgrade, unfortunately the script does.Head in the Clouds reminded me of two similar films which had yet to be made: Joe Wright's Atonement, and Paul Verhoeven's Black Book. These two films have something that Head in the Clouds could use...development. This feature contains a story that has nowhere essentially to go, and features characters who are insufficiently defined. When it's all over, you come to realize that Head in the Clouds is essentially a melodrama. It is glossy but generic.Too much of the story is dependant on a romance between Stuart Townsend and Charlize Theron which lacks credibility and chemistry. As a lead actress, Charlize Theron is quite inept. I'm not convinced that she tried all that hard. Theron is little more than a body to go inside a bunch of pretty dresses. sometimes she actually feels like the product of a materialist 21st century. The best performance in the movie is turned in by Penelope Cruz. She is able to portray emotion better than anyone,in part because her role is also the best in the film or so it seems. All the more disappointing it becomes then, considering that One of he worst decisions Head in the Clouds makes is to drop Cruz in an abrupt/unconvincing manner after we have gotten to know her so well.Head in the Clouds has an overlong climax with a rushed ending, that sort of leaves the audience in question. I admit, I am a little disappointed in the finished project. Its beauty is equisite, but the movie is unable to generate enough emotion or intelligence to justify my recommending this as anything other than a fancy date movie for twenty-somethings (it's not a teen movie)

A young, impoverished, passionate left-wing Irish student at Cambridge University, Guy Malyon (Stuart Townsend) falls in love with a happy-go-lucky, American-born socialite Gilda Bessé (Charlize Theron). Maylon follows her to 1930s Paris, where she is a professional photographer and where she lives with a Spanish-born nurse named Mia (Penélope Cruz). Maylon and Bessé cohabitate and work together. Inflamed by the injustice of the fascist Falange in the Spanish War, Mia and Maylon leave Paris to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Maylon eventually returns to Paris; he later fights in World War II; and he constantly longs for Bessé.Somewhere, someone commented that this film could have had the tagline, "How world events can mess with your love life." That pretty much sums it up. Maylon wants to be with Bessé, but the great struggle against fascism keeps derailing their relationship. Frankly, the script is ridiculous. In fact, the whole storyline is completely overdone and melodramatic. It seems very contrived. It is as if the screenwriter wanted to tell an epic, dramatic love story against the political events of Europe 1934-1944, but this film doesn't have the heft. It's no "Dr. Zhivago." Additionally, the acting is fairly awful and over-dramatic. I can't believe that two Oscar-worthy actresses needed to act in a movie as absurd as this one. There is nothing subtle about the script that would befit their great acting talents. After seeing this film on cable television, I was so disappointed that I was moved to write the foregoing comment. I would recommend avoiding this film.

I'll keep this simple -- this movie could have been great, but it wanted to be too much. It wanted to be epic, it wanted to be about friends and it wanted to be an anti-war movie and on top of that, it wanted to be about WWII and the underground work. I wanted to like this movie and while it's not impossible to watch, it is slow and plodding some times. This is a movie that really could have hit the audience hard, but it just kind of laid there instead.We go through a long, long development of the relationship between the two main characters Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend. This could have been story enough, but no, we have to follow them over a 10 or 15 year period and go all the way through WWII. Early on, we are introduced to Penelope Cruz who is a good friend to Theron's character. And from this we kind of slip into a pseudo-three-way that never fully develops. Then there is the Spanish Civil War that Cruz's character feels she must partake in as well as Townsend. Again, this could have been an interesting story all on its own. Finally, we get into WWII and it drags on and on and I started to lose interest in the characters and the story. It's all just too much of a BIG story and, at the same time, not enough of a story to really hold our interest. The actors were okay, though sometimes I felt like Theron was just reading her lines. Townsend, for the most part fits the role, but other times he comes across as too modern for the time period. There are a few twists and turns here that keep the viewer interested, but overall, its not as good as it could have been. A shorter version, about one of the many story lines could make this a really, really good film.

This movie is a good illustration of a passionate romance based only on intimacy. No matter whom the lovers are deep inside, their pleasure is in the flesh, whatever it is with women or men. So, when the mind and feelings come, they lose their bond and they can leave each other.With the years passing, this truth gets less powerful but in the tragic era of World War Two, every second can be decisive.I found the cast wonderful: I just like Penelope Cruz's accent and it's an evidence that Charlize Theron is a damned good actress! The scope of this love story is appealing between stern England, cool Paris and wounded Spain! As full of it, a very good surprise! (the only flaw: the Parisian neighborhood looks really like a movie set, and I don't say this just because I live in Paris!)