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Parents' Guide to

Stay

By Cynthia Fuchs, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 18+

Complex movie with mature themes -- not for kids.

Movie R 2005 98 minutes
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Is It Any Good?

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Kids say (2 ):

Often evocative, sometimes audacious, and finally undone by an inelegant close, STAY is more like an art installation piece than a film. Though somewhat too fond of the morphing transitions and built atop a hoary concept -- a moment of death unpeels into multiple layers of experience, memory, and projection -- it does achieve an eerie reorganization of space (in particular, lower Manhattan), as well as a sometimes shrewd, sometimes nutty investigation of time, as a matter of faith, convenience, and construction.

Director Marc Forster is working from a script by David Benioff. Stay's obsession with loss seems of a piece with both their previous interests (Forster's Finding Neverland, Benioff's novel/screenplay for 25th Hour). 25th Hour remembered 9/11 by imagining a strangely nostalgic future; this movie also evokes 9/11 in its images of a broken New York, and is at once more hopeful and less believable. Its final images are so unlike what's come before that they feel tacked on, a resolution from nowhere that is, at last, unconvincing and daunting.

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