Embers

A lovely meditation on identity and the difficulties of personal connection, Embers is a descendent of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker in both tone and mise en scène.

While one wishes Carré, who shares screenplay credit with Charles Spano, might have hung those stirring visuals on more involving plotting, "Embers" nevertheless makes a strong, not to mention timely, impression.

It's metaphorical aspects like that, and the striking visuals that delineate the stark contrast between the worlds above and below ground, that make Embers memorable.

An elegant, brooding drama with a sprawling international cast, the movie presents its haunting premise with barely any explanation, leaving viewers to steadily make sense of the chaos along with the confused protagonists.

Claire Carre's debut feature could be described as a mass-scale Memento, but that thumbnail sketch misses both the pic's impressive conceptual breadth and its numbing dramatic stasis.

Carré succeeds in creating a haunted mood. The mood is so strong, in fact, that it overwhelms any sense of narrative development -- the movie feels a bit like a video-art installation expanded to feature length.

Wildly impressive, Claire Carré's science fiction indie, Embers takes visceral cinema with a small budget and colossal imagination to exciting new heights.

There's much to like in Carré's impressive film.

EMBERS is stunning and contemplative, a science fiction film that is as emotional as it is intellectual.

Attempts to be a complicated dissection of a possible world not too far ahead of us, but it lacks the imagination to make us soar along with its vision.

A powerful, thoughtful and moving work of science-fiction that engages the head and the heart.

Carré weaves from her ensemble amnesi-apocalypse a reflection of the human condition as philosophically compelling as it is emotionally intelligent, while celebrating our species' tenacious resilience...