This movie is so slow that I had time to figure out each and every plot twist. Art does not have to be boring. The director Scott Hicks is trying real hard to be Ingmar Bergman and he fails badly. I believe in watching a film from the beginning to the very end but I really wanted to walk out of this one half way. The scenes are all so slow that you have time to figure them out and jump the the surprise twist before it happens. All the interesting bits are shown in jump cuts and the dull bits are left on the screen until you want to scream. If you want to see an interesting movie with lots of snow go to Fargo. A friend of mine walked out and asked me the next day how it ended. I asked her go guess. And she told me her what she thought the ending was. And she was right! "Bad art is bad for the soul." Oscar Wilde

I really wanted to love this film. The cinematography was gorgeous, the acting very believable, the story compelling, and the plot very moving.However, whereas the frenetic time-cuts/image flashing of say, a film like Requiem for a Dream, are extremely appropriate to THAT story, this film's extreme time cuts/image collaging seemed to detract and annoy from the slow, beautiful message of the original novel.I think, in general, the novel was a tough one to translate to film. Which perhaps is always the case, but this story dealt with so many issues, so many side-lines- with a murder mystery at its heart- that when you finally get to the end of the film, you're a bit bored and very confused.A jumble, but an okay jumble. I'm glad I saw it, despite all my criticisms.

This is probably the worst movie I have ever seen in my life, and the first video rental that made me and a buddy push the fast-forward button more than three times. When you have two religious viewers show the most emotion when a character swears at his former love while losing a limb, you know the movie is really bad. Snow falling on cedars has way too many shots of snow actually falling on cedars. And snow falling on the ground. And people talking like they are watching snow falling. Soooo boring. Believe me, it is much better to simply sit in front of your apartment window and watch the snow actually fall then to waste money renting this movie.

Best film I've seen in the last 20 years...I will not elaborate or critique the film which others have done before this comment, but I just want to say that Scott Hicks should get an award for his director's comments voice over. The film was great by itself, but watching it with the director's comments sent chills up my spine....There are very few films I can watch over and over...this is one of them. Hicks did somethings climatically that were so bold, so touching, yet he never resorted to cheap Hollywood clichés. The scene with the two young year old lovers inside the ceder tree could have been very disturbing, but Scott used cut-aways and a soaring music to underscore the intense passion of first love (hatsukoi) rather than debase his work by resorting to the show of flesh...