Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

john-679-519514 I enjoy apocalypse movies of all types and have watched hundreds of them and am always on the lookout for more, but I must say that this is the worst apocalypse film I have ever watched.The movie doesn't even feel like a movie. The first 5 minutes of the movie are the only story you will get. From there on it is just watching dirty people suffer.I am unsure what the plot of this movie is or what story it is telling? Movies should entertain or at least tell a story.You could sit on a street corner in any city and see a more engaging story told as the world passed by.I have no idea why this film has to many high marks on IMDb. Why would I want to sit and watch someone eating cookies for 5 minutes? When the lady is looking for her son you must endure 5 minuted of her shrill voice calling "Benne" over and over. It is horrendous.This movie is like a work of art, I suppose, in that one person may see something deep and meaningful while another will only see lumps of paint. This movie is lumps of paint to me.

goodbadandugly I'm really just trying to save other sci-fi fans from wasting their time on this one. This is probably the worst sci-fi I've ever seen. It could really use a plot (why did they leave the city? where were they trying to get to?). One hundred and nine minutes is way too long. Many takes just go on and on pointlessly. I'd say edit to thirty minutes, better yet, just make it a TV episode of The Survivors. Finally, there is some pointless background conversation that receives subtitles, but other important conversations don't get translated at all. I gave it three stars instead of one because the acting is very good and there is one really good music track while they are at the train station.

kieronboote-134-969472 "Time of the Wolf" is a film that appears to have been overlooked and underrated in the Haneke critical literature. Haneke has described the film as being about "how people treat each other when electricity no longer comes out of the outlet and when water no longer comes out of the faucet". He has also said that it focuses upon "very primal anxieties".The film takes it title from "Voluspa", an ancient Norse poem which describes Ragnarok, the end of the world. Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf" used the same source for its title. The narrative of the film describes the trials of a mother, Anne, a wonderfully committed performance by Isabelle Huppert and her two children, Eva and Ben, set adrift into a post apocalyptical world where society has broken down.Anne passes through the film with an unflinching, grim determination to move her family forward, despite witnessing the brutal murder of her husband George (yet another "George and Anne" at the head of a Haneke nuclear family) at the outset of the film. The family move away from the city to seek shelter in their countryside refuge in response to what appears to be the breakdown of society. We learn that uncontaminated water is scarce and at certain moments we see livestock being burned so there would appear to be some form of infection. Fire is to become a very important motif in the film.Haneke does not dwell on the reason for the "end of the world" because the theme of the film is to question how and why people our humanity makes us cling onto civil society and morals even when all appears to be lost. The cause of the apocalypse is unimportant and what we are left with is a once comfortable urban bourgeois family trying to survive when they are reduced to the level of refugees in Bosnia, a conflict fresh in Haneke's mind when he made this film.The film is shot in natural light, or perhaps more accurately for most of the film, natural dark! Night time shots leave us reaching desperately into the pitch black night. Ben goes missing from the temporary refuge they find in a barn. The cigarette lighter used by Anne and the torches of straw lit by her daughter as they search for him becoming ever distant tiny points of light against a black canvass, miniscule signs of contact and hope in an enveloping darkness. Until the barn itself becomes ablaze as one of the straw torches ignites the whole. Suddenly what was hope and refuge is a source of fear as too much light could attract danger.The Laurent family then encounter an unnamed teenage boy, played by Hakim Taleb. Unlike the outsiders who come to aid of the vulnerable in the usual sci-fi post apocalyptic film the boy eventually comes to symbolise a lack of commitment to societal norms, a betrayal of Eva's young ideals and his independence results in the amoral killing of a goat that was used to provide milk.The family come upon a vestigial community at a railway station. Here there is social order but the community is controlled by a leader Koslowski. Continuing presence in the community relies on the "residents" ability to barter and exchange whatever possessions remain or by the women offering sexual favours. Anne attempts to shield her young some from the brutality of their situation and literally shields Ben from a rape that takes place in their community Accusations against a Polish family of the murder of a farmer are accepted on the word of a guard and yet when during a moment of quiet horror the family who murdered her husband suddenly arrive at the station her accusations are discounted for lack of evidence. In a single parallel moment Haneke shows us the breakdown of a fair system of law and order and of the embedded xenophobia and racism that survives the dystopian future.Small glimpse of kindness and humanity survive in various gestures amongst the community, a bowl of milk is given for free, civilising classical music is shared on a walkman, entertainment is provided by a man who does magical tricks with razor blades and the void that follows the breakdown of our media driven society is filled by the creation of myths. This is the legend of the 35Just, a group who's mission is to safeguard humanity by self sacrifice in fire. The group are spoken about around camp fires in the night in the same way that myths and legends were passed down in the pre literature era – reinforcing the way that humans revert to primal responses in the face of the uncertainty of their world. The legend of this group climaxes in the powerful and moving scene where Ben, desolate, lost and intoxicated by the mythical tale of the 35Just, strips naked before a fire, again the only light in a pitch black night, and just as he is about to enter the flames he is stopped by one of the guards – un-coincidentally the one at the centre of the previously seen brutal treatment of the Polish family. The guard hugs the boy to him and offers him a vision of optimism.The film ends on a long tracking shot of a train travelling through the countryside. Has the family been rescued or this is a projection of the hope for the future? Either way, almost uniquely for Haneke, what is an otherwise bleak film appears to end on a note of hope.A terrifying and un-sensationalized vision of how modern man, without the embellishments of modern day society, quickly reverts to a primeval hierarchy, barter and mythology but that we can saved by the essential humanity that lies within us all.

kevitron This movie follows the survivors of an unnamed apocolyptic event. The fact that the details aren't disclosed doesn't bother me. What does bother me, however, is the poor acting and lack of character development. A man is murdered for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and it doesn't seem to phase his wife or children in the least. They just keep on truckin as if nothing ever happened. And nothing else does happen, really, until another half an hour into the flick when they finally arrive at a railroad depot to join more survivors of what is probably an environmental disaster. Once there, you never get to know any of the characters except for a few of them. The rest are merely forgettable faces with no names or personalities. Nothing continues to happen for the remainder of the film, save for a few events that are confusing due to the fact that I don't really know or care who any of these people are. All in all, it's not an absolutely terrible movie, and I think that I agree with the director that human society is only as strong as its' food supply. But I found myself looking at my watch more than the movie screen.