The Kindness of Strangers

Name: The Kindness of Strangers
Director: Lone Scherfig
Released: 2019

Lone Scherfig

2019

Synopsis

Clara and her two sons escape from her abusive husband with little more than their car and plan to start over in New York. After the car towed away, the family meets Alice, who gets them into an emergency shelter. While stealing food at a Russian restaurant called ‘Winter Palace’, Clara meets Marc, who has been given the chance to help the old eatery regain its former glory. The ‘Winter Palace’ soon becomes a place of unexpected encounters between people who are all undergoing some sort of crisis and whom fate has now brought together.

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Recommendations

63
Movie Nation
It doesn’t wholly come off, with back stories too thinly developed, pathos and cruelty blending with the whimsy of a New York con.
50
Screen Daily
It’s a big-hearted picture, certainly, but one that doggedly labours its message.
42
IndieWire
While the movie works to depict how kindness breeds kindness, even in the cruelest of environments, it spends much of the time watching its motley collection of lost souls chase their own tails.
40
The Guardian
The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.
40
Variety
Too much of the kindness in “Strangers” feels sentimentally story-dictated rather than born of profound human observation, leaving you with mild, woolly good feeling but little to contemplate or chew on.
38
Slant Magazine
The film’s repetitive and lifeless dialogue robs otherwise charismatic performers of distinguishing characteristics.
38
RogerEbert.com
Scherfig’s latest effort pursues something naively magical, only to end up with a mélange of miscalculated, cheap sentiments.
30
The Hollywood Reporter
As a supposed snapshot of life in the unaccommodating big city, and of the humane gestures that can soften that harshness, it feels utterly synthetic, not to mention a romantically "European" view of New York that's sheer nonsense.