SOURCE: “The Sweet Hereafter: A Cry of Hope,” in Washington Post, December 25, 1997, p. C01.

In the following review, Hunter suggests that The Sweet Hereafter's ambiguity and unusual chronology are among its strengths, but notes that these elements may bother some viewers.

Here's one way to look at it: Man is a meaning-seeking creature.

Pitiful being, he cannot accept the random cruelty of the universe. That is his biggest failing, the source of his unhappiness and possibly of his nobility as well. He paws through disasters with but one question for God: Why? And God never answers.

He certainly doesn't answer in Atom Egoyan's superb The Sweet Hereafter, which watches a mad, vain scrambler seeking to impart his own meaning on someone else's terrifying disaster. As derived from the intense Russell Banks novel, the story follows lawyer Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm) on his peregrinations through a western Canadian...