Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Before I got down to watch it, I thought it was all gonna be about a girl who was going to Lourdes in order to cure of being in a wheelchair. After watching 10 minutes of this film, I felt there was nothing much going on but only seeing people walking around the pilgrimage but nothing else. It might've changed later during the movie but I wouldn't waste my breath in watching the whole movie! It would be too late then for me to see the action. For me, I would rather see the action in movies at the beginning straight away because you are in with the story already and it makes your time well spent in looking at the movie!I just think the movie could've done better in showing only the characters to the audience then seeing the passersbys. It just makes the film look rather dull in my opinion! It's very disappointing that it's too slow!

Borderline masterpiece. Beautiful film about, you guessed it, Lourdes (a small market town in the Pyrenees where a number of supposedly 'mystical' healings have occurred.) More specifically, it follows the story of Christine, a wheel chair using woman with multiple sclerosis and a number of others who hope to be healed. It is a very moving piece of cinema and can be interpreted in two ways. One, religious, the other, sceptical. I prefer the latter explanation, but the film's true intentions are not exactly clear. Either way, the film illustrates hypocrisy and masked cruelty of Catholicism in a subtle and beautiful way. Having said that, there is a mystical, almost haunting, air to the film. The quiet, echoing organ music that plays repeatedly throughout further enhances this feeling.

I think this film brings to the fore some very interesting and fundamentally important issues. I didn't find it an easy film to watch, due to the challenging nature of these issues, but ultimately i found it rewarding and thought provoking. Disability is always a difficult area to portray on screen, but this film did so without resorting to patronisation or irreverence; I thought Sylvie Testud was magnificent and i really related to her feelings of isolation and anger that manifested themselves prior to her "healing". The attitudes of the other disabled pilgrims to her after this healing were also wonderfully depicted; why her and not me? The wheel-chair bound Mr. Hruby and the mother of another disabled girl react with an uncomfortable but natural jealousy to the miracle. And we then get to the matter of faith; for all the cynicism that surrounds Lourdes and the "touristy" nature of it (which is undisputed), the open displays of faith and the essence of hope cannot be underestimated. I found the scenes focusing on faith very moving; for all the criticism of particularly the Catholic church of late, one cannot dispute or try and detract from the faith of those who "believe". This was the heart of the film, for me. Although one could say that it is almost a parody of Lourdes and all it stands for, the faith of those who make the pilgrimages there cannot be disputed. The film raised these questions without ever offering answers; for such difficult and essential subjects that is all it can ever do. It certainly made me ask questions of myself, which is exactly what a film should do.

I am Roman Catholic. Lourdes is a blessed, mystical place. I hear. The story goes, the Virgin Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in a grotto near Lourdes several times. Word spread, a shrine was built, miracles occurred, all in this small community in the south of France. Now, millions travel to Lourdes every year, looking for intervention from St. Bernadette and the Blessed Mother. While I've never been there, I have been to shrines, like Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount-Royal in Montreal. The relics for sale and presence of the pilgrims are a little scary, but there was no denying the power of the place. So, I was very interested to see a pilgrimage from the perspective of a pilgrim in Lourdes, a movie playing at the Cleveland International Film Festival, this week. Christine is a young woman from France who has multiple sclerosis. She's lost control of her body from the neck down. But, her mind is vibrant, she seems to accept the help of nurse volunteers at Lourdes with a pleasant demeanor. She tells a priest, in confession, that she gets angry over her diagnosis and feels envious of able bodied people, like a nurse who is flirting with a man on the trip that she fancies. This is like a group tour, with a different activity each day: a hike through the grotto, a bath in the water, even an award at the end of the trip for the "Best Pilgrim." Christine's mother is with her on the trip. Their relationship is one of the things that bothered me in the movie. While her mother accepts the role of caregiver, they barely talk or interact, except in a very distant fashion. I didn't get that. A couple of the older volunteers hang together at night and discuss deep topics of faith and spirituality. Juxtapose that with Christine confessing to her nurse that she is not really a believer, she just goes on the pilgrimages because she can't really get out of the house for much else. When the inevitable miracle occurs, within the group, some are jealous, others are skeptical, others just wonder why some are chosen and others are not. Lourdes is a very quiet, very slow moving film. I guess I was hoping for more of an epiphany, but at the end, I wasn't at all sure what I was supposed to take away from it. I was interested but not satisfied. I give Lourdes a 7 out of 10.