The Good

An interesting movie from one of the most interesting filmmakers around.

The Bad

All in all I don't think the packaging helped set this film apart.Exotica Director Atom Egoyan brings us an interesting 21st Century tale with Adoration. The movie centers on a high school boy who writes a story that asserts that his father was a terrorist. Suddenly, a firestorm is created as everybody outside and inside the boys life begin to wonder if there is any truth to these claims. The boy then sets about on a journey and this allows him to examine his dead father's life in a way that most people never do: under the critical microscope of who our parents are and what they represent to us.

Adoration is the kind of movie that defines the term slow burn. Rich with interesting performances and an even more compelling story, it wastes no time in bringing us into a world that we only seem to glimpse but can never fully understand.

Features

Deleted Scenes

I was happy to see that these scenes were on this release but I am not sure how necessary they were. This is the kind of movie that at 101 minutes tells us exactly the story it seems Egoyan wanted told. These scenes were cool in that they showed us the characters doing things that may have been talked about in the movie (not seen because they were excised), but all in all I liked this film the way it was and I felt the scenes were superfluous.

Making Of.

Atom Egoyan Interview

Atom Egoyan is one of those directors who I really admire. I have only seen one of his other films (the aforementioned Exotica) but I really like his stuff. There is something about his work that remains independent, covers a lot of similar indy ground, yet it never gets mired in the traps that so many of those films fall into. In this interview he talks about the film, the characters, the story, where it came from, what his thoughts are, etc... however, he never seems as serious as his name would suggest. Good stuff, Sony.

Video

Anamorphic Widescreen - 1.78:1. This film looked pretty darn good in standard definition. The images were nicely captured by Director of Photography Paul Sarossy. The film has a somewhat blown out look throughout, but at the same time there is also a level of desaturation that works well here. While I am sure that Sony could probably make this thing look much better in Blu-ray, for an older format it seems that this company isn't selling us standard definition holdouts short.

Audio

Dolby Digital. Close Captioned. Languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese 5.1 Dolby Digital. Subtitled in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The audio on this film was fine but none of it really grabbed me too much. There isn't anything bad about it but at the same time there isn't anything that is that great. I thought he might use the audio to get into the character's heads, but it more or less was in the background and sort of foretold the story we were seeing.

Package

Looking like a horror movie I think the packaging that Sony employed gets this movie all wrong. There are pictures of all the cast members and behind them are more pictures with a video effect. The back cover features more of this, a description of what this movie is about, a Special Features listing, a cast list and technical specs.

Final Word

Atom Egoyan is one of those filmmakers that, if you are a lover of movies, or you write movies, or you direct, or you desire to do all of those things, you undoubtedly love. His movies are rich triangles of human interactions. There are moments where the plots are incomprehensible and then there are times when everything is quite easy to follow. Just when you think you have a make on what the "motivations" of these people are, things change and as a viewer that's okay because it just makes the experience of an Atom Egoyan film more interesting.

Adoration barely came out in theaters but fans of this director shouldn't worry too much. His career is such where no matter what happens at the box office, he will able to continue making his movies.

Adoration was released April 15, 2009.