Nowhere in Africa

Everywhere in Nowhere in Africa, skill and art translate into vivid life.

It has everything Oscar voters fall in love with: sweep, romance, accessibility and social conscience.

This German movie, with its lush cinematography and lovely score, has the sturdiness of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. What isn’t Hollywood is Link’s refusal to tell the audience how to feel at every moment.

This picture is absorbing -- and eye-filling -- whether the prose and the passion are connecting or running on parallel tracks.

This is a fictional film, but it is based on a novel by Stefanie Zweig that is autobiographical. The adaptation was done by the director Caroline Link, whose screenplay is serviceable and whose directing is generally sure.

Sinks into melodrama.

Isn't really a dull film so much as an oddly quaint one that seems to find a comfortable perspective about drastic circumstances.