Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more
 

Two Brothers (2004)

Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

More animal magic (ish) from Annaud, 16 years after Jean Reno tangled with ‘The Bear’. The eponymous siblings here are of the ‘fearful symmetry’ variety, heralded by the cutesy opening titles: ‘The tigers Kumal and Sangha in...’

The brothers’ idyllic cub life in the jungles of 1920s Indochina is shattered when relic-hunting adventurer McRory (Guy Pearce) ransacks their ancient-temple habitat and kills their father. The pair are soon separated; one ends up in the zoo, the other in the circus. Reunited as young adults, they escape to terrorise the district– and McRory is hired to find them.

Pearce negotiates his minimal dialogue with convincingly impassive solidity, but, otherwise, nearly everything involving the beastly humans is an embarrassment: wooden actors in caricatured roles delivering hokey dialogue, handicapped by inept dubbing and Stephen Warbeck’s horribly intrusive score. But no matter: the noble felines are spellbinding presences, and Annaud relates their adventures sans excessive anthropomorphism – right up to the unexpectedly moving finale. Four legs good, two legs bad indeed.

Author: NY 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out London Issue 1770: July 21-28, 2004

  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud

Cast: Guy Pearce, Jean-Claude Dreyfus, Freddie Highmore

Duration: 104 mins


Features

Making a name for himself

Making a name for himself

Sin Nombre's Cary Joji Fukunaga learned his lessons well.

To the letter

Forty years later, Costa-Gavras's Z still brims with fury.

Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work.

Fool's gold

Can an Oscar win lead to a cursed career? Here are five stories of postaward professional meltdowns.

We are the championed

Terrorists and teens abound in this year's "Film Comment Selects."

A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

True romantic

James Gray exchanges urban amorality for amour in Two Lovers.

Playing in the dark

MoMA salutes pianist Stuart Oderman's 50 years as the one-man sound of silents.

Junk bonds

Cast and crew recall the making of the classic NYC drug drama The Panic in Needle Park.