Golden Door (2007)

Total Film
3 stars out of 5 -- "The Old World meets the New in this sumptuous tale of Sicilian refugees arriving Stateside..." 07/01/2007 p.44

Box Office
"Vincenzo Amato gives a riveting performance....GOLDEN DOOR resounds with moments of pure cinema....One of the year's most affecting cinematic journeys." 06/22/2007 p.61-62

Sight and Sound
"[T]he film's style confirms Crialese as a figure of great promise in Italian cinema....A film that succeeds in portraying the huge shock of a sudden move between two worlds..." 07/01/2007 p.54

Ultimate DVD
3 stars out of 5 -- "Keeping a narrow intimate focus on people rather than epic vistas....Sweet..." 04/01/2008 p.93

Wall Street Journal
"[A] visionary work by Emanuel Crialese....[The film] combines harsh realities with magic-realist fantasies....Agnes Godard did the dazzling cinematography." 02/27/2009

DVD Talk 8 of 10
"Golden Door" is a beautiful, lyrical film approaching the subject of relocation with the wonder and apprehension it deserves...Remarkably, Crialese avoids all the traditional iconography (Statue of Liberty being the most notable absence) to buttress the story, relying on gorgeously composed cinematography to help explore the themes of hardship, loneliness, and dread as these weary individuals deal with the frosty reality of their arrival after such a brutal migration...The New York sequence that closes the film is almost procedural in tone, following Salvatore and his family as they are subjected to tests of mental dexterity and medical longevity. The camera stays on the immigrants throughout, extracting their confusion as they realize with sincere depression that the land of the free has more rules and regulations than their simple farm life back home. They can sense a great change coming for them from behind the bars that corral them like cattle, but are frustrated with the lack of progress..."Golden Door" is perhaps a footstep too abstract in intention to classify it as the preeminent tale of immigration. However, it remains an extraordinarily strong, fascinating look at the genesis of the traditional immigrant tale, not the idealized finale. - Brian Orndorf
 
Reel.com 6 of 10
Like the Miramax prestige pictures of years past, Golden Door is beautifully made but simple-minded Oscar bait, a film guaranteed to offend no one and to attract a large contingent fans who will love it for the nobility of its intentions and the earnestness of its performances. While the film has considerable strengths thanks to a talented director (Respiro's Emanuele Crialese) with an impressive eye for detail, in the end it suffers mightily by comparison to the better films on the same subject that have preceded it...Watching Golden Door, it's impossible not to be reminded of Elia Kazan's America America, an epic masterpiece about an immigrant's journey from a Greek point of view. Kazan's film is just as detailed and beautifully made as Crialese's, but it's a lot more emotionally complex and dramatically intense. The same can be said for a very different but equally brilliant movie, Martin Scorsese's documentary on his parents, Italianamerican. Scorsese is credited as a "presenter" of Golden Door, and it's clear that he feels a kinship with Crialese's point of view. The irony is that Scorsese evokes a more vivid portrait of the immigrant experience simply by filming his mom and dad in their New York apartment--his film contains the rich sense of personal experience that Golden Door lacks. - Jim Hemphill