Sliding Doors (1998)
Directed by Peter Howitt
Helen, a London ad executive, is fired from her job and rushes out to catch a train, but, as she runs down, her life suddenly splits off. In one version she catches the train; in the second, she misses it. Her whole life changes in that one second, and the rest of the film depicts what happens in each scenario.
10 connections found
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10 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Sliding Doors to
As one guest notes, you saw Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Sliding Doors” (1998), it’s somewhat the same paradox.
If that sounds unbearably erudite, writer-director James Ward Byrkit offsets the headiness with drollness, such as a reference to the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow rom-com Sliding Doors.
His characters even reference a previous film that drew on such watered-down multiverse theories, the rom com Sliding Doors.
However, there's one lone house in the neighbourhood that still has its lights on, and the friends discover that its inhabitants look strangely familiar... Writer/director James Ward Byrkit has basically taken a Twilight Zone episode and stretched it to feature length - the mind-bending plot invokes both Sliding Doors and the Schrödinger's cat paradox as the guests grapple with potential parallel realities.
At one point, when everyone’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on, Laurie brings up Sliding Doors, the Gwyneth Paltrow movie about two alternate realities that diverge based on whether the heroine boards or just misses a train.
Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, in his feature debut, achieves effective chills with only eight actors and a living room, intermixing quantum physics (shout-outs range from Schrödinger’s cat to “Sliding Doors”) with the very mundane human tendency toward bad judgment calls in a crisis.
The filmmaker has blended a “Futurama” episode with “Serendipity” (and perhaps specks of “In Time” and “Sliding Doors”) to craft that near-extinct being, the quality date movie.
…movies like Sliding Doors (1998) and Kate & Leopold (2001) ?
And like the indecisive heroines of “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run,” though to a vastly more insane degree, she must entertain multiple possible versions of her own story — all in a movie that plays at times like a very long, very surreal “Choose Your Own Adventure” novel from which the pages have been torn out and then glued back together at random.
There’s no doubt that the pure ambition on display is stunning, and the Daniels couldn’t have found a better cast to anchor a film that’s sometimes a sci-fi martial arts epic, sometimes a "Sliding Doors"-style drama, sometimes an over-the-top Paul Verhoeven-style satire and sometimes just a ridiculous fratty comedy.
There's a little Sliding Doors in this film, although, unlike the earlier movie, The Butterfly Effect is not a romantic comedy, nor does it show us the parallel evolution of different universes.
Okay, from It's a Wonderful Life to Sliding Doors, movies have engaged in this hypothetical game before.
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Tim’s own regrets about his life make the character a sort of Sliding Doors dark mirror image of Jay…
As a result, I?m placing it among my quantum genre film favorites -- along with The Fountain , Mulholland Drive and Sliding Doors .
The basic plot cleverly reworks familiar material from a variety of tried and tested sources: the most obvious is Groundhog Day , but there's also Rashomon and Sliding Doors , films concerned with people consciously or unconsciously given the opportunity to observe, learn from and reshape the past.
Split screens are used to show multiple social media streams in tandem, and often to dizzying, “Sliding Doors”-like effect.
It’s literally a Sliding Doors style scenario, where in order to reaffirm exactly how important boomer culture is, (and boomers) they create an entire movie premised on what would happen if boomers… had never existed.
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Through a series of cheerful, implausible near-misses, an obnoxious cameo by Eugene Levy, and starry-eyed banter with quirky best friends (Jeremy Piven, the funniest sidekick in Hollywood, and Molly Shannon), director Peter Chelsom tears a page out of countryman Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors playbook in presenting a romantic fable that is far more interested in chemistry than narrative.
(In this respect, some viewers will recognize it as kin to the early Gwyneth Paltrow fantasy Sliding Doors.)