After losing her house for a false back tax, Kathy Nicolo, a reformed drug addict. She does her best to restore her house from his new owners. The thing that brings terrible for her.
If "House of Sand and Fog" ultimately feels like a failed exercise, it has less to do with Perelman's limitations than with a book that would have been better served by staying on the page.
Perelman and his long-suffering stars make a spectacle of pain, but fail to register any lighter notes, while the denouement seems calculated to wring out every last tear.
Demanding, provoking and painfully slow. The single most compelling reason for seeing it is the magnificent performance from Kingsley, who deserves every prize on the books.
If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, almost unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.
Connelly, who has often mistaken posing for acting, digs deep here; Aghdashloo ... gives us a portrait of a woman who is both dutiful to her husband and ravaged by his iron will. Kingsley is most impressive of all.
Chicago Tribune
February 04, 2004
You feel you not only know these people but where they come from.
Blogcritics.org
July 19, 2005
The dramatic scheme is to show how two people ... intersect "tragically," but what we see is a group of characters who act as wrongheadedly and intransigently as imaginable.
A lack of empathetic characters cripples this poorly paced but well acted drama about an Iranian family who purchase a city-auctioned bungalow in Northern California after its former tenant has been unjustly evicted.
