Movie Review: ‘Life of Pi,’ Directed by Ang Lee (3 Stars)

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By A.O. Scott

★★★---It unfolds in a setting that is one of the great achievements of digital cinema, and a reminder that the eclectic Mr. [Ang] Lee is, among other things, an exuberant and inventive visual artist. The problem, as I have suggested, is that the narrative frame that surrounds these lovely pictures complicates and undermines them. The novelist and the older Pi are eager to impose interpretations on the tale of the boy and the beast, but also committed to keeping those interpretations as vague and general as possible. And also, more disturbingly, to repress the darker implications of the story, as if the presence of cruelty and senseless death might be too much for anyone to handle. [link]