Really Surprised!

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

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I read the synopis for this film and then thought this would be a very interesting film to view. Uma Thurman does a decent job and is convincing as the tormented mother Diana who is getting over a school shooting incident that happened when she was in high school. Even Rachel Wood who plays the younger Diana back in high school is also very good. The film switches (without really any warning) between the two time periods.The film starts off well and you can be forgiven that this is going to be a melodrama with psychological themes for Diana - and it is essentially. The film doesn't give you straight on the plate what happened back at the shooting and the fact that Diana was a survivor. So you get to know her better when she was younger and how her hopes and dreams and fears were contemplated for her future adulthood and we see in the present day how this has influenced her life.Up to the halfway point the film is hooking but then it keeps switching back and forth without really giving you time to absorb what has happened in both times. You really are waiting to get down to the point of what really happened back in her high school and keeps making flashbacks to it but then keeps pausing. It can get a bit frustrating and for me personally I just wanted them to get to the point. When it gets there, it is a bit puzzling but once you realise what the film was climaxing to - it is a bit of a cheat (though luckily nothing as horrible as Perfect Stranger's ending).Thurman gives the performance to watch here and Evan Rachel Wood is equally as good. The cinematography was really good and captured the mood of despair and sorrow the film carries. I don't know why so many critics hated it - it must be because of the constant switching back to try and entice you and ends up frustrating you sometimes and the ending which seems a bit implausible but overall I enjoyed this film and it shows how for some people they can imagine a life they may have in future and not realise how much the present impacts them.

Based on the novel by Laura Kasischke, "The Life Before Her Eyes" is a melancholic tale of a woman who survives a horrific, Columbine-type massacre while in high school, only to be haunted by the experience for the rest of her life.Half of the film focuses on her life today, fifteen years after the event, as Diana struggles to be a good wife and mother amid painful memories she is unable to put behind her; the other half recounts the days leading up to and including the tragic event, when she was basically just a typical rebellious teen, uninterested in school and chafing against life in a small town, dreaming of the day when she would be able to move on to bigger and better things, unaware, as we all are, of just how easily our lives and dreams can be shattered at a moment's notice.Screenwriter Emil Stern flows seamlessly back and forth between the two time periods, providing a spellbinding look at the devastating effect trauma and survivor's guilt can have on the human psyche, the permanent damage they can cause. You'll have to decide for yourself whether the "Carnival of Souls"/"Sixth Sense" –type ending works or not (I happen to think it does), but either way, this is an incisive and thought-provoking work that can be interpreted on many levels. (It also explains why the Zombies' "She's Not There" seems to be playing every time someone turns on a radio).Uma Thurman portrays Diana as she is today, while Evan Rachel Ward plays her as a restless teen, and both are excellent, as is Eva Amurri as her best friend in school. Vadim ("The House of Sand and Fog") Perelman's direction is artful, lyrical and hypnotic, and James Horner's haunting score sets just the right tone for this strange little mood piece that will have you thinking long and hard about your own life and the importance of living in the moment.

As I was watching this movie, I kept wondering where it was going, but it took to the very end for me to figure out the kicker. The life she is living and with flashbacks to her teenage friendship and school relationships is merely an envisioned life. I life that hasn't and in this case won't happen. It is an ultimate play on that venerable phrase "seeing your life flash before your eyes". In this case the older Diana played by Uma Thurman is that life that flashes before the eyes of the younger Diana played by Evan Rachel Wood in the midst of a high school shooting just before being shot. I thought this revelation made the whole movie that much better and worse at the same time. It effectively desensitized some of the flashbacks to that tragedy and romanticized the rest of her "visualized" life. This was an interesting film only after the turn and rather boring and difficult to watch to get there. The acting was decent, the directing by Vadim Perelman was creative and I look forward to seeing his remake of the classic horror Poltergeist in 2011. Not a movie worth spending a lot of money on, but worth a look if your bored of action or comedy and need a decent if quirky drama.

This movie is boring and dumb. First of all; ominous background music all through a film does not make a thriller! And the ending, honestly... Have movies with surprise/twist endings become so fashionable that the rest of the movie doesn't even matter anymore? Granted, the movie does contain some poetic cinematography, but pretty close-ups of flowers and bees does not make the story any better or more exciting - it just makes the film pretentious and boring. In my opinion, watching this movie is a complete waste of 90 minutes. Life is too short for stupid movies like this one.And c'mon Uma - why are you in this movie???