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xaipe
Jun 27, 2012xaipe rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
This is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It was released in 1999 when I first saw it and remains clear and constant in my memory. Hungarian director Istvan Szabo's "Sunshine" has the heft and scope of such movies as Visconti's ''Leopard'' and Bertolucci's ''1900'' epics. "Sunshine" is a triptych following the lives of a Budapest Hungarian Jewish family at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ralph Fiennes plays the lead in the portrayal of successive family generations and I think it's one of his best roles. The title is the English form of the family name "Sonnenschein" and the name of the liqueur which made the family fortune. There are a lot of flaws in this movie, but it lives in my memory clearly and deeply as works of art do which transcend temporal experience to create a truer reality in fiction.