Chapter by chapter, a devastating drama unfolds

By Steven Rea Inquirer Movie Columnist and Critic Rating: There are so many big things going on in Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven - love, death, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, even some taut political thriller stuff - that it's easy to imagine the film imploding from the stress of it all. It doesn't, though. In fact, the movie is near-perfect, suspenseful, heart-breaking, profound. Akin, a German director of Turkish descent whose 2005 feature, Head-On, offered a surprising, exhilarating cross-cultural love story, returns to the themes of conflict and coexistence - Turks in Germany, trying to assimilate, hanging on to social and religious moorings; and Germans in Turkey, likewise looking to find their way in a different world. But The Edge of Heaven succeeds not because of its bigness, but because Akin takes us... [read full story]