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The House of the Spirits
Directed by
Bille August
R
1993
2h 20m
Drama
,
Romance
6.9
31%
72%
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A rancher, his clairvoyant wife, and their family face turbulent years in South America in this adaptation of Isabel Allende's best-seller.
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Cast of The House of the Spirits
Meryl Streep
Clara del Valle Trueba
Glenn Close
Ferula Trueba
Jeremy Irons
Esteban Trueba
Winona Ryder
Blanca Trueba
Antonio Banderas
Pedro Tercero Gareia
Armin Mueller-Stahl
Severo del Valle
María Conchita Alonso
Transito Soto
Vincent Gallo
Esteban García
Jan Niklas
Count Jean de Satigny
Joaquín Martínez
Segundo
Sarita Choudhury
Pancha
Teri Polo
Rosa
Miriam Colon
Nana
Vanessa Redgrave
Nivea del Valle
Grace Gummer
Clara del Valle Trueba - as a Child
Hannah Taylor-Gordon
Blanca (child)
Josh Maguire
Pedro (child)
Fran Fullenwider
Ester Trueba
Pedro Efe
Interrogation Officer
Hans Wyprächtiger
Dr. Cuevas
Miguel Guilherme
Soldier
José Mora Ramos
Soldier 1
Martin Umbach
TV Reporter
Carlos Rodrigues
Postman
Anabela Teixeira
Helena Laureano
Patrícia Tavares
Maria Hernâni
Carlos Conceição
(uncredited)
Heitor Lourenço
(Uncredited)
Isabel Simões
(Uncredited)
Osvaldo Canhita
(Uncredited)
Denys Hawthorne
The House of the Spirits Ratings & Reviews
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Inert from its opening moments to its too-long-delayed close, this lackluster production is an example of international filmmaking at its least attractive, and a misstep in the careers of pretty much everyone involved.
Entertainment Weekly
Lisa Schwarzbaum
August's earnest International Motion Picture Adaptation remains all too tethered to earth, weighted down by a surfeit of good intentions.
Orlando Sentinel
Jay Boyar
The House of the Spirits is like Gone With the Wind with the fun and excitement replaced by lofty. All that's left is the wind.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Carrie Rickey
How can an accomplished director take a great novel, the best actors working and the finest technicians available and make a film so... bland? It's a puzzlement.
Chicago Tribune
Michael Wilmington
The flaws aren't fatal. The beauty and brilliance that might have been, don't preclude the quality and bravery that exist on the screen.
New York Times
Janet Maslin
It does take daring chances with a book that could not have been adapted otherwise, using extraordinary actors to rise above its occasional lapses. The lack of fidelity is often offset by intelligence of a subtler kind.
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
All of the characters have the right names, all of the necessary events occur, and indeed the very best local actors have been engaged. But the soul has been mislaid.
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
Ultimately, The House of the Spirits blends enough melodrama and magic realism and personal conflict framed in political terms to keep virtually any audience happily absorbed.
Newsweek
David Ansen
The greatest actors in the world can't overcome a script that boils everything down to the Esperanto of cliche.
TIME Magazine
Richard Schickel
The thing works in its goofy way, mainly because Bille August is a man of apparently dauntless conviction. He has written and directed every scene with serene authority.
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
It's always painful when a brilliant book becomes a bust of a movie.
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
This is really quite an achievement. It brings together Jeremy Irons, Meryl Streep, Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas, and Vanessa Redgrave and insures that, without exception, they all give their worst performances ever.
Variety
Todd McCarthy
Just as the characters' motivations are mostly crude rather than complex, and the view of class politics superficial and romantic rather than acute or intelligent, so is the film's treatment of the novel's magical realism on the mundane side.
Washington Post
Joe Brown
Cinematographer Jorgen Persson gives The House of the Spirits plenty of picturesque moments, but August's stolid, straightforward direction isn't suited to Allende's magical-realist voice.
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
The viewer doesn't have to be familiar with the book, however, to realize the film's a pretentious failure.
Hartford Courant
Malcolm Johnson
Nearly every magic detail, many key characters and half a generation has been sacrificed to clarify the plot. But so much has been cut away that only the skeleton of the story remains.
Baltimore Sun
Stephen Hunter
It's also a wretched paradox: a big budget, star-driven art film whose very elements subvert its ambitions and turn it into the thing it least wants to be -- a listless '50s-style Hollywood melodrama.
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
The film version stresses political intrigue and revolutionary violence at The expense of the anything-goes dreaminess that gives the book its most memorable moments. A stellar cast doesn't help much.
Philadelphia Daily News
Gary Thompson
This isn't just a bad movie -- it's hugely, grandiosely, pompously bad.
TV Guide
The story, from the best-selling novel by Isabel Allende, is purely incidental to the unintentionally hysterical stylings of this potential camp cult film. It's truly awful, and one shouldn't miss it for the world.
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