Reviews for BIRTH and CODE 46:

4 Stars (out of four)
4 Stars (out of four)

No two movies in recent (or regular) memory have challenged, infuriated, inspired, and touched me like these two movies—they are both poetic, religious, pure and meditative experiences, equal to something like life passing before your eyes, illustrated vividly with all the organic, living texture of flesh and the thrilling, sweeping isolation and crisis of Eternal Sunshine (Code 46), or like a TS Eliot play of death, rebirth, those small, unified, personal cosmos and the blurring between the two, like some avant-garde, up-close, handheld fantasy of fading, twisting, foggy human nature—its singular, undying, bold and confronting vision reminds one of many great excersises in the liberation of cinematic form in the past—Dreyer’s Gertrud, Last Year at Marienbad, or Cocteau’s Orphic trilogy. It’s beautiful, it’s ugly, it’s close, it’s passionate—these two are alien, seductive dreams—no, revelations—made with the lightest touch, hand in hand, with the craft and disagreement and fever of a thousand burning, blazing minds, emotions and experiences of all sorts—everything, from political climate to death to rebirth to the slightest look, form or gesture of a hand are all treated with the same, lucid, jawdropping intensity, balanced and skimming everywhere from the unbearable lightness of being to the darkest, most terrified tell of a worn out human face. And I will be damned if there were any two more gorgeous, inspiring, speechless movies this entire decade, and you’d be outright lying if you said there were any movies like these two.