Eternity and a Day

Working with cinematographers Giorgos Arvanitis and Andreas Sinanos and composer Eleni Karaindrou, whose beautiful and stirring score greatly reinforces the film's impact, Angelopoulos has created another masterpiece, one that recalls such classics as Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Kurosawa's Ikiru (To Live). [28 May 1999, p.F6]

Eternity And A Day occasionally lapses into navel-gazing ennui, and Ganz's reluctant kinship with the adorable moppet courts cliché, but Angelopoulos strings together so many haunting, exquisitely choreographed sequences that even his worst ideas are emotionally resonant.

All things being relative, this is a dreamy, lulling film but also a more concise and straightforward one than the magnificently grandiose Ulysses' Gaze, the Angelopoulos opus that directly preceded it.

This rambling but beautiful feature by Theo Angelopoulos may seem like an anthology of 60s and 70s European art cinema: family nostalgia from Bergman and seaside frolics from Fellini; long, mesmerizing choreographed takes and camera movements from Jancso and Tarkovsky; haunting expressionist moods and visions from Antonioni.

Angelopoulos' leisurely pace and trademark long takes add up to a film guaranteed to please filmmakers nostalgic for the bygone glory days of European cinema.

Eternity and a Day is a graceful, elegiac, humourless film, a poetical work that invites you to fall in with its meditative pace. [16 May 1999, p.6]

There are moments here and there with potentially eloquent points of departure, but they dissolve in the mists of the director's ultimately aimless estheticism. [21 May 1999]