Greatest (Blu-ray)

"The Greatest raises compelling questions about how parents continue on after the death of a child.  Claudia Puig, USA Today
"Brosnan, on a roll with this film and The Ghost Writer, vividly etches the emotional fissures in a man coming apart. The Greatest takes a piece out of you.  Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

Editor's Note A heartbreaking end to young love is only the beginning in this drama. After teenage Bennett and Rose finally begin a romance after years of furtive glances, Bennett dies in a car accident. His parents, Grace (Susan Sarandon) and Allen (Pierce Brosnan), struggle to deal with the death of their son, but their attempts at peace are interrupted by Rose's announcement that she is pregnant.

	Susan Sarandon
	Pierce Brosnan
	Shana Feste - Screenwriter
	Shana Feste - Director

Hollywood Reporter
"[A] vigorously wrought film....Sarandon is strikingly sympathetic as the brittle, obsessive mother, while Brosnan's calm rectitude smartly masks a man on the verge of imploding. Both performances are daring and brilliantly shaded." 01/18/2009

Box Office
3 stars out of 5 -- "A well-written film about grief and rebirth....THE GREATEST is a moving story of love, loss, hope and renewal." 02/26/2010

Rolling Stone
"Sarandon nails every nuance as the alienated mom....[Brosnan] vividly etches the emotional fissures in a man coming apart." 04/15/2010

USA Today
3 stars out of 4 -- "[S]ome moments are so raw and insightful that they feel like a punch to the heart.....The performances in this emotional drama are credible and moving..." 04/09/2010

New York Observer 7 of 10
Grief comes cloaked in as many forms as the tragedies that cause it. Almost all of them are on view in The Greatest, a somber, sensitively acted, intelligently penned and sincerely directed film about the untimely death of a much-admired young man, the profound impact it has on his family and the various ways the people who love him learn to express their mourning. The usual grumpy cynics will undoubtedly call it sentimental and manipulative. Ignore them. In spite of an unfortunate title that invites critical puns, The Greatest is cut from the same bolt of emotional genre fabric as the 1980 classic Ordinary People -- a rare bird among films because it is strong and filled with extraordinary human values that remain foreign to most hermetically sealed studio packages. The title refers to the boy who departs too soon, not to the movie itself, which may also depart too soon depending on box office grosses, but not because it's undeserving...Susan Sarandon has traveled this road before, especially in the sucrose melodrama Moonlight Mile, where she played the novelist mother of a murdered girl whose fianc? (Jake Gyllenhaal) moved in and mysteriously cured her writer's block when she embarked on a book about her dead daughter. ("Fuck the perfume, give me the warts!" she whooped in the final reel.) As a family drama about the death of a prodigal son, The Greatest falls, as I mentioned earlier, in the much more distinguished tradition of Robert Redford's Ordinary People. A debut effort carefully written and directed by Shana Feste, it offers a nuanced diagnosis of people in both their goodness and imperfection, with a touching screenplay that focuses on the actual things people do and say in survival mode. This is not the kind of personal movie Hollywood knows how to make very often, and God knows it is not the kind of movie Hollywood ever knows how to sell. (Already they're asking, "Does it have legs?") It's not Avatar, but in an equitable movie world, there should be something for everyone...One caveat: If it's true, as they say, that as one door closes, another door opens, I feel that perhaps in The Greatest too many doors open too fast in time to meet the deadline for a happy ending, but this is just a small hangnail amid the manicured strengths of a film of maturity and courage, one that kept me consistently engaged. Quite an accomplishment, really, for a new filmmaker on her first date with a camera. - Rex Reed