Metacritic-Rezensionen

Bride Flight gives a panoramic sweep of lives as they're lived, as there is a lot of beauty in it.

The kind of lush, epic romantic weepie that Hollywood used to deliver on a regular basis for packed matinees at Radio City Music Hall.

A devil-may-care adventurer and three vastly different gals emigrate from the Low Countries to New Zealand in the romantic epic Bride Flight, a glossy European meller that switches between the '50s, the '60s and the present

The flashbacks dominate, playing like wet-inked storyboards: pioneer women forced into patriarch games; a baby born in secrecy and raised in deceit; Jewish legacy lost and found. When the men are all dead, the women speak freely, wrapping up two florid hours with a pickled sentence or two.

Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.

Switching between the 1950s, the '60s, and the present, it's compelling in a middling miniseries kind of way – expansive but not terribly deep.

Trauma from WWII haunts each character, but even the historical foregrounding doesn't keep Ben Sombogaart's weepie from being more soapy than serious.

The plotlines are clichéd and the score overbearing, but uniformly strong turns go a long way towards shaping the lush, nostalgic atmosphere. Don't forget to bring tissues.

It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.

The subtitles and period setting conjure a smattering of respectability, but in essence, this is arthouse pap, particularly for older audiences, turning the past into a concatenation of worn-out tropes that comforts as it distorts. Think of it as instant mashed potatoes for the soul.