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Naomi Watts cries, screams and whimpers in The Impossible, a foolishly titled movie about a very serious incident involving Thailand, the year 2004 and a tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people. At times powerful, at other times drawn out...

Can it really only be eight years ago this past week when the world changed? On December 26, 2004 a tsunami hit Southeast Asia like a bulldozer, destroying everything in its way. The tragedy was briefly highlighted a couple of years ago...

"The Impossible," a film based on the true story of a family's effort to survive after the Indian Ocean tsunami hit their hotel on Boxing Day 2004, generates the deep emotions needed to reach out and put a death grip on your heart.

In movies, even the most universal truths aren't a given. Love can appear unconvincing; family members seem like they barely know each other.

The driving engine here is the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the story follows a Spanish family on Christmas vacation in Thailand who were so separated and thoroughly battered but reunited against odds so long that the film's title is only a slight...

There’s a long stretch in the first half of J.A. Bayona’s mostly sappy disaster drama The Impossible that’s consistently powerful, thanks to a tough, emotionally raw performance from Naomi Watts. Watts plays Maria, a British woman who comes to...

I’ve been watching movies non-stop for 30 years, studying them non-stop for 20 and been on-and-off film sets for at least 10 and yet for the first time in a very, very long time I am actually astounded by the visual spectacle presented in a movie.

Based on a true story, The Impossible follows married couple Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor) as they and their three sons (Tom Holland's Lucas, Oaklee Pendergast's Simon, and Samuel Joslin's Thomas) arrive in Thailand for a relaxing...

The Impossible centers on a young British family vacationing in Thailand when the 2004 tsunami pummeled the coast. It's a story told in such masterstrokes of staging and suspense - and anchored by such agonizing performances - that I frequently found...

It’s time for American audiences to grow up. Every story in the world is not about English-speaking WASPs. THE IMPOSSIBLE tells the story of the 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of Thailand. As you might expect, this was an absolute horror for...

This film is based on the incredible true story of a Spanish family's (portrayed as British in the film) survival of the devastating Tsunami in Thailand on December 26, 2004. The Indonesian Tsunami, which killed nearly a quarter of a million people...

Perilous incidents have riveted audiences since Pauline was tied to the railroad tracks, but in the hundred-year history of cinema, few thrillers have been as emotionally compelling as “The Impossible.”

Juan Antonio Bayona’s “The Impossible” captures what its title implies. It transports us to an unimaginable situation, into an absolute nightmare in which air is replaced by rushing water, families are ripped apart, and people’s lives hang in the balance.

My fear in reviewing The Impossible is that, in telling you what's so special about it, I'll make you not want to see it. On the surface, the movie sounds unpleasant, like the kind of thing that will make you nuts. Well, it will make you nuts.

“The Impossible” is an impressive and deeply troubling picture, both for intentional and unintentional reasons.

J.A. Bayona’s “The Impossible’’ is a true-life disaster movie that opens with a spectacularly harrowing re-creation of the mass destruction and death wreaked by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

There is a reason we need and seem to find the bright spots in even the most despairing of stories; it is simply that we may remain sane in the face of senseless tragedy. The Impossible tells a relatively hopeful story of the tsunami of December 26...

Juan Bayona's debut "The Orphanage" helped pave the way for a new wave in Spanish genre films and knowing the plot and the premise for "The Impossible," it's hard to think of a movie that could be any more of a departure.

While spending Christmas vacation at a tropical resort in Thailand, a family becomes separated when a devastating tsunami destroys their coastal retreat. Maria (Naomi Watts) and son Lucas (Tom Holland) battle for survival while trying to reunite with...

The Impossible is a disaster movie. Not a Dean Devlin/Roland Emmerich/Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer disaster movie, but a disaster movie nonetheless. Set against the backdrop of the 2004 tsunami that devastated large portions of coastal southern Asia...

Some tragedies are so massive in scope it's impossible to fully wrap our heads around them. One such tragedy befell hundreds of thousands of people on December 26th, 2004, when a massive earthquake under the Indian Ocean hurled a tsunami on the shores...

The catastrophic nature of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that opens the fact-based drama “The Impossible” is rendered with nightmarish realism by Spanish director J.A. Bayona (“The Orphanage”).

It’s a nightmare come true! A British family of five is spending the holidays in a beach bungalow at a hotel on Khao Lak in Thailand when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hits. This is based on the true story of their harrowing experience – and it’s not...

It’s been five years since J.A. Bayona debuted with the terrifying, tearjerking ghost story The Orphanage, and now he makes a belated return to the director’s chair with The Impossible, based on the true story of a family that was visiting Thailand in...

Everything that was false about the tsunami sequence in the recent Clint Eastwood film "Hereafter" -- the bland overview perspectives, the lack of human immediacy -- is corrected, terrifyingly, by the first half-hour of director J.A. Bayona's...

Back in 2008 Juan Antonio Bayona made a fantastic feature debut with “The Orphanage”, a creepy Spanish language flick that combined chills and heartfelt emotion deftly. His sophomore effort “The Impossible” has been a long time coming, the director selec

Say a prayer that The Impossible is the closest that you or I or anyone anywhere will get to the kind of catastrophe that makes this movie so harrowing, riveting — and uneasily ''uplifting.''

The trouble with The Impossible, which tells the story of a family whose Christmas vacation in Thailand is regrettably disrupted by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, isn't that it arrives "too soon," but that there will never be an appropriate time for a...

Based on the true story of a family swept away by the deadly 2004 tsunami that pummeled Southeast Asia, The Impossible is about as subtle as a wall of water.

These questions seem to bubble from subconscious vents miles apart, but there’s an existential current that binds them both, and you can feel it in The Impossible.

A bravura piece of technical filmmaking, an above average piece of storytelling, beautifully acted, and relentless in its depiction of human misery and suffering, The Impossible is the film for you if you want possibly the most realistic, and...

You can fling some fairly hefty reservations at the logistically astonishing white-knuckle disaster movie The Impossible, so let’s start with them, consider the “white-knuckle” bit, and see which stick.

In J.A. Bayona's neo-disaster-film, everything but the carnage is cheap. Appropriating a "true story" about a family torn apart by the 2004 Thailand tsunami — the Spanish clan who inspired it have been Anglicized in the form of Naomi Watts and Ewan...

You can take issue with its overly Anglicised approach to an international tragedy, but there’s no denying that this rousing, superbly acted, no-holds-barred melodrama is a mighty feat of physical filmmaking.

This visceral and deeply moving true story follows the desperate efforts of a family to survive and reunite in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor give astonishingly raw performances as a married...

The Impossible Based on a true story, this wrenching film is sometimes too overpowering as it explores events we can barely imagine. Especially strong performances help keep it from becoming maudlin or mawkish. And the deeply personal approach makes...

If the tsunami of Dec 26, 2004, which killed nearly a quarter of a million people in 14 countries, has not touched your lives, then "The impossible' will definitely do that and much more.

Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts plumb the depths in so many gruelling ways in this extraordinary true story of a family swept apart by the 2004 tsunami. Emotion runs high, but Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona doesn't go the Hollywood route with...

THE IMPOSSIBLE is a gruelling and gut-wrenching depiction of a family caught up in the boxing day tsunami of 2004 directed by talented Spaniard Juan Antonia Bayona, his second film after impressive debut The Orphange.

At a time when horror movies had turned to schlock, Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage (2007) brought emotional care to screen scares with an adult fairytale about clinging onto the impossible even when all hope seems lost.