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the audience applauded

Purely Joyful Movie!

Fresh and Exciting

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

How did I miss this when it first came out?? Very enjoyable movie. Engaging premise, nice acting, great visuals. Definitely worth watching.

When I traveled to China in 2001 I had an experience where I saw my grandmother sitting on a bench. She was holding my hand and telling me that everything was OK and that she has passed. I had this dream twice in two night, until I learned from family that she did pass.I am an atheist. I do not believe in a god or creator. We are part of a bigger picture that as humans we are too ignorant to see, feel or hear. The dead are all around us all the time. We are caught up in our lives and material possessions. We sink in to our electronic devices and miss the world around us.Matt Damon does a good job of being a believable physic and the rest of the supporting cast is well matched. The special effects are good enough to keep you interested in the action. The script moves along at a good pace and takes you from moment to moment with no delays.I like how they portrayed the dead and their spirits in the afterlife. It reminds me of my experience with my grandmother.I think this movie is a bit better than "What Dreams This Way Came" because it gets rid of the abstract art and presents the viewer with reality of the scene. It is more realistic.While not all the movie is perfect, there are enough perfect scenes to give this move a thumbs up

On the surface, "Hereafter" is as much about the afterlife as "Ghost", "Flatliners" or "The Sixth Sense" but it's a Clint Eastwood movie so its approach to its central theme is less in the realm of supernatural spectacle than meditative contemplation. Yet for all its commendable pretension to be a meaningful existential drama, the film delivers less than the aforementioned movies... but it still got praises!I actually read some positive critics, and I was surprised by Roger Ebert's reception ... surprised to a limit, because it was a few months before "The Tree of Life" came out and became one of his ultimate favorite movies, so my guess is that it takes one's soul approaching its own mortality (Ebert or Eastwood) to reach a capability to embrace the material. I'm questioning my mortality all right but maybe I'm young enough to miss the film's beauty or alive enough to spot some flaws. "Hereafter" consists of three stories told separately. The first involves Cecile de France as Marie, a French survivor of the Tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2004. The second story is about Marcus (Frankie/George McLaren), an English preteen who loses his twin brother and tries to "contact" him. And the third protagonist is George, Matt Damon as a medium who can see your dead relatives through simple hand contact. His psychic abilities resulting from a childhood's concussion have poisoned his life and made him reject the one thing making him special, like Chris Walken in "The Dead Zone". To be fair, all these stories had strong potentials when taken separately, the problem is that they cancel each other. Marie lived a near-death experience and while she can share her experience with friends or family members capable of empathy, we only see her handling her post-traumatic experience with her colleagues and her detached lover played by Thierry Neuvic. So naturally, she encounters misunderstanding and is awkwardly surprised about the hostility. The way I see it, either she's going through an emotional phase... and then shouldn't be surprised about the lack of enthusiasm from people whose relationships are strictly professional, or she believes in her story in a more opportunistic fashion. Either ways, there's something rather confusing about her motivation. When she decides to write a book, it's handled as an end rather than a mean, she doesn't even talk with people who lived similar experiences, she only takes some notes from a doctor who worked at palliative care and just in time before the movie closes, she gets invited to the book fair. I get that the film is more interested in the 'living' matters and won't try to make a philosophical statement about her vision of the afterlife, but it wasn't really effective in turning Marie into some sort of whistleblower or heroic crusader. Marcus' story had the most enthralling premise but some shadow of mystery would have fitted it better. Marcus can't talk to his deceased brother Jason "obviously" but we know there's one person who can help him so it's a matter of time before the two stories tie together. There's nothing wrong with predictability but there's something slightly disappointing when the viewer is one step ahead of the characters, when he knows where it's all heading to. We know Marcus will easily slip through his foster parents' attention, we know all the attempts to reach his brother will fail, and when they did, I was really cringing at how phony some mediums were... for a movie meant to feel real.Now, regarding George, the film makes us believe in an afterlife or at least an existing frontier between life and death, which is well rendered in the opening sequences (although one can interpret them as hallucinatory visions). For all we know, maybe George only reads in people's minds. But there's no doubt that he's got a gift and he considers it a curse. Still, the film is unconsciously manipulative in the treatment of George when it's not the result of pure lazy screenwriting. For instance, everything we should learn about him is given to us on the nose by his brother at the most convenient time, but the reason we give credit to George's predicament is because it ruins a promising relationship with Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard).Seriously, what were the odds of having a love at first sight with a woman who had a troubled past, and involving a dead person at that? Why wouldn't George help a woman to talk to her deceased son if it can bring some comfort, especially since he accepted to help the kid? Everything seems driven by the evolving requirement of the plot but never leaves much to empathize with or simply understand, the script turns the universal theme of the afterlife or its intellectual or emotional quest to a McGuffin leading to a sappy sentimental conclusion.There was room for some daring take on the subject, like Peter Weir's "Fearless", and God knows that Clint Eastwood is an expert when it comes to make meaningful and poignant movies but his stories have always dealt with active characters, who fulfilled some achievements. In "Hereafter", the areas of achievement are left unclear or unrevealed so that even the best scenes are drowned in a sort of existential bouillabaisse and one of rather bland taste.If the film was a spectacular as its opening, as powerful as that moment where Melanie burst into tears, the ending could have been an emotional knockout. But the film deals with contrived coincidences, and each good scene is the result of a set-up made of lackluster uninspired moments so unworthy of Eastwood; even when it's slow, it's not Eastwood slow, it's so slow it made me mentally contemplate so many possible visions of an afterlife I almost reached the nirvana of boredom.

HEREAFTER is an intriguing supernatural drama from acclaimed director Clint Eastwood. This film ties together three varying plot strands into a satisfying whole. As a film it's a slow-moving and largely subtle character drama, exploring the effects of death upon three diverse characters. The first is a French woman who survives the Boxing Day tsunami in the film's hair-raising opening sequence, which in five minutes outdoes the whole of THE IMPOSSIBLE. The second is Matt Damon as a psychic struggling with his abilities. The third is a London schoolboy whose brother is killed in a car accident.I always feel uneasy about Hollywood productions like these as all too often they veer into mawkishness and sentimentality but for the most part Eastwood avoids those pitfalls. Instead, HEREAFTER feels realistic throughout and the exemplary direction helps that. The acting is the film's strongest element and if not much really happens by the end, you're so caught up in the lives of the characters, as hard as they are, that you don't really mind. It's hard to believe that Spielberg, the man behind CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, could executive produce a film like this.