How I Live Now (2013)
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Reviews Counted: 31
Fresh: 22 | Rotten: 9
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 4.2/10
Critic Reviews: 5
Fresh: 3 | Rotten: 2
No consensus yet.
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User Ratings: 2,880
Movie Info
Set in the near-future UK, Ronan plays Daisy, an American teenager sent to stay with relatives in the English countryside. Initially withdrawn and alienated, she begins to warm up to her charming surroundings, and strikes up a romance with the handsome Edmund (George MacKay). But on the fringes of their idyllic summer days are tense news reports of an escalating conflict in Europe. As the UK falls into a violent, chaotic military state, Daisy finds herself hiding and fighting to survive. (c)
Nov 8, 2013 Limited
Magnolia Pictures
- Official Site
Cast
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Saoirse Ronan
Daisy -
George McKay
Eddie -
Tom Holland (X)
Isaac -
Harley Bird
Piper -
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All Critics (31) | Top Critics (5) | Fresh (22) | Rotten (9)
There's not really enough here to get teenage girls totes emosh. Not enough to sigh and swoon over.
Top CriticWeird, weird, weird.
Held together by a forceful performance from Saoirse Ronan, director Kevin Macdonald's adaptation of Meg Rosoff's novel makes up in emotional immediacy what it lacks in broad dramatic sweep.
Proof there can still be boring stories during extraordinary times.
Ronan is almost always worth watching, but not especially in this drippy outing, in which she morphs from sullen teen brat to can-do wilderness heroine under the influence of an attractive red-headed hawk trainer.
There are a few effectively disquieting sequences early on, but the film never recovers from director Kevin Macdonald's indifferent staging of a pivotal moment.
OK, but too brief and too front-loaded to really engage the viewer.
Isn't a mess, but it's indirect, irritatingly so, wasting a tempting premise on half-baked emotions and aimless moments of distress that should be far more penetrating than they actually are.
It has an exceptionally skilled filmmaker at the helm, plus three of the finest young actors working at the moment. So it's a strongly involving odyssey.
Saoirse Ronan makes the story work. And she let's us believe in Daisy's serial transformations, from sullen teenager to dreamy lover and, ultimately, fierce and resourceful survivor.
Stultifyingly unambitious.
An uncertain affair, powerfully played and sporadically affecting, but lacking the singular clarity of vision that becomes Daisy's survivalist mantra.
How scary this film is will depend on your age, cinematic experience and self-confidence of the precarious world we live in.
Based on the prizewinning novel by Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now is impeccably crafted with some beautiful cinematography from Franz Lustig and tender direction from Kevin Macdonald.
Packed with integrity but not likely cash cow franchise potential, How I Live Now is a refreshing miss-hit more interested in challenging than indulging its audience.
A singularly odd, consistently bewitching piece of work.
Meg Rosoff's young adult novel about a teenager struggling to survive in the aftermath of nuclear war was a big hit with readers, but here director Kevin Macdonald mishandles it.
I enjoyed the post-apocalyptic anxiety, a bit like Survivors on 70s TV: a world of farmhouses, Land Rovers and underground bunkers.
The harsh beauty of the English countryside shines through in Kevin Macdonald's harrowing teen survival yarn.
Watchable teen survival drama enlivened by a strong central performance from Saoirse Ronan and a handful of chilling visuals, but the central romance falls flat and the third act feels anti-climactic.
All England is here: a blend ... of dark with light, of the eternal-pastoral with tense and tactile forebodings of an unwritten future.
Remarkably bleak for a teen movie, this drama keeps us gripped as it throws its characters into an odyssey that's seriously harrowing.
An Arab Spring-y allegory with kissing cousins and a divine countryside setting, Kevin Macdonald's fourth narrative film is an awkward oddity, as uncomfortable in its own skin as its protagonist.
Macdonald's film may operate within the same genre as past releases like Tomorrow, When The War Began and Red Dawn but it's more intelligent and a lot darker than those films.
Audience Reviews for How I Live Now
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- Daisy: This Is how I live now.
Discussion Forum
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