A Beautiful Life (2008 film)

Plot

A young woman, Maggie (Angela Sarafyan), is on the run from her abusive father. David (Jesse Garcia) is an illegal immigrant working as a dishwasher while searching for his mother in Los Angeles. The two meet, and fall in love.

Cast

Release

Although produced in 2008, the film was not released widely in North America until October 2, 2009, and first appeared on DVD on March 1, 2011.

This was the second film by New Films International, a long-existing global independent film distribution company based in Sherman Oaks headed by Nesim Hason, whose new American division was led by Tim Swain. The company describes its focus as "festival-driven, high-quality, cast-driven indie films".

Reception

A Beautiful Life received poor reviews from the twelve sources noted by the Rotten Tomatoes website. Metacritic gave the film a score of 13 out of 100, summarizing the reviews of the seven critics it measured as "overwhelming dislike".

The New York Times called it a "laughably clichéd dive into sexual masochism", and The Village Voice saw it as a "misery pile up ... about broken souls and crossed paths destined for the trash heap. Scream, smash, slap, cry, repeat."

Slant gave it a half-star out of four, saying that "its awfulness [comes] in so many forms that it's hard to single out just one appalling example". Variety felt that it provided "unintentional laughs by the barrel", and predicted that the film would be a box office bomb. NPR said that although the film deals with some serious topics, the random nature of characters and controversies made it hard to appreciate them, describing it as "too earnest to be a hoot, and too amateurish to be anything else".