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The third of Barry Levinson's Baltimore trilogy (following ‘Diner' and ‘Tin Men') is a gentle and low key yet hugely impressive film that is a worthy successor to his enormously prosperous and Oscar winning ‘Rainman'. Although adopting the box office disaster strategy – ‘no stars just talent', Levinson manages to create a small yet thoroughly incisive look at the changing face of America and its values during an eventful period in its cultural history.

Set in the mid 1950's at the height of the post war economic boom and on the eve of Television's dominance of domestic life, ‘Avalon' looks closely and lovingly at the lives, loves and disasters of three generations of a Polish family in the New World. Opening with a magnificently shot flashback of Mueller-Stahl's arrival in America on July 4th some forty years earlier, the film develops a nostalgic yet never overtly sentimental approach to its subject matter and always keeps its story-line rooted firmly in reality.

Although the film has no specific plot or central character, the magnificent Mueller-Stahr emerges as the principal paternal figure trying to keep his increasingly disparate family of brothers, children, nephews, nieces and sundry together amidst the turning tides of cultural change. Joan Plowright plays his stubborn wife who has never learned to fully adapt to the lifestyles in the West, while his son Aidan Quinn is trying desperately to cash in on the American dream that brought his father to those shores in the first place.

A tale told with great colour, character and humour and populated with a huge assortment of human characters and memorable moments, 'Avalon' is a beautifully composed piece of American cinema.

This is my third attempt at publishing this review, so hopefully three is the charm. My unfounded hunch is that the subject matter is so close to my own life that the editors of IMDb determined that I devoted too much space to personal experience rather than to the film itself. I will state only once that I grew up in the company of immigrant Polish Jews throughout the 1950's and 1960's in the Newark, New Jersey area, only 200 miles up the tracks from the film's locale of Baltimore, so total objectivity on my part is problematic.

In spite of my personal background, I felt curiously distant and detached from most of the film's characters and their lives. Although Armin Mueller-Stahl is a very good actor, his accent is strictly German, which, to my ear, has a very different sound than the Polish Yiddish accent that I know so well. On the other hand, Joan Plowright, who doesn't have a single ounce of Poland or Yiddish in her background, impressively masters the dialect, intonation, and body language perfectly as Mueller-Stahl's wife. My problem is that I didn't find Plowright's character very sympathetic as she is quite a kvetch, if not an incurable dingbat. Why should it be so difficult for an immigrant fleeing from economic, political, and religious persecution to understand the meaning of Thanksgiving, a day dedicated to simple, humble gratitude? Her odd perplexity is even more troubling when we had to endure her clueless whining repeated a second time. And enough with the "toikey" already! Whether that family conflict is based on reality or not, it isn't compelling enough to consume so much of the movie's time and energy. This is only one example of several of the film's vignettes, many repeated more than once, which left me shrugging my shoulders.

I specifically disliked how the holocaust of World War II is gratuitously inserted into the post war segment. I found the kitchen conversation of the two young wives nothing short of bizarre as they struggle to figure out where exactly Eva's brother actually met his wife. Why not just ask them to clarify where they met? Was this the most significant aspect of a campaign of genocide that occurred so close to these young women's lives in more ways than one?

Although the movie was filled with snazzy cinematic techniques and gimmicks, there was a strange, prevailing emptiness to it for me. As usual, Randy Newman's nostalgic score was among the film's most positive attributes. While the family clearly seeks economic opportunity in Baltimore, there should be much more meaning of a non-materialistic nature to the pursuit of life and liberty in America. I wasn't permitted to feel it until the very last scene, which was very significant, especially since the setting is Baltimore, the place where Francis Scott Key composed "The Star Spangled Banner". Why, however, did it take two hours and eight minutes to draw me emotionally into this film?

I'm 73 years old these days. I first saw Avalon about 25 years ago and I thought it was a fine movie. I watched it again yesterday and, in my eyes, it has now become a masterpiece. It is essentially about the life of one immigrant who came to America in 1914 as a young man, brought over by his brothers who came before him. He starts a family. The movie follows the family through the decades ranging from the 1940s to the 1970s. The family is in most ways ordinary. No one invents anything. These is no great artist, nor criminal. It is, essentially, a sentimental, somewhat bittersweet trip through mid-20th Century America.

I guess I have come to love Avalon because I have taken that same trip. My life's journey was about 20 years later than the one portrayed in the movie, and I was in Columbus, Ohio, not Baltimore, but many of the vignettes depicted in Avalon could have been mine. So, my 8-star rating is based largely on how I personally identify with the movie. If I were 18 and were watching it on TV on a Saturday afternoon, I'm not sure I would have made it through the whole movie. The film would not speak to me, at least not yet. Fact is, I may be in the last generation that sees Avalon in nostalgic terms rather than historic terms. I guess that's what happens with the passing of time.

AVALON (1990) **** Armin Mueller-Stahl, Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth Perkins, Kevin Pollak, Joan Plowright, Lou Jacobi, Elijah Wood, Leo Fuchs. Barry Levinson's personal masterpiece, loosely autobiographical, on family values. Absolutely charming and at times poignant account of the Krachinsky clan, spanning four generations of the Baltimore based Jewish immigrants, and the effects of suburbia, television and the decline of the closeness of American families at large. Wonderful ensemble of talent with a steadily paced and absorbing calmness in tone. Stahl gives a sterling endeavor as does young Wood as his wide-eyed grandson. Loving valentine for all families perfectly realized. Great production design and cinematography.

It was like watching 30 Woody Allens frantically talking at the same time. At some moments a bit overwhelming but, all in all a good movie, also reminds me on Woody Allen's "Radio days". America, when the american dream was still a thing people believed in.

Although this film takes place 15 years before I was born, growing up in an ethnic family in the early 60's had changed very little.

My family is Greek, but this film will appeal to any ethnic group especially first or second generation Americans. Back then we all still gathered at one member's home for holidays and on Sundays. We all dressed up (and still do) for church and holiday gatherings. Watching little Elijah Wood with his bow tie reminded me of myself at that age.

Mr. Levinson through film, and Randy Newman through his haunting musical score did a magnificent job of recreating a world that has all but disappeared. A time when family was the center of our lives, children respected the adults and were expected to behave in a civilized manner, people didn't spend Sundays running all over town to football, soccer games etc, and the elder members of the family were revered instead of ignored or worse, placed in a home.

We, those of us in the post-war generation would to well to look at this film as a guideline for how to bring values back into our lives and realize that we all need to re-think our priorities.

If you want to relive your childhood for 2 1/2 hours laugh one minute and cry the next, I HIGHLY recommend this film

Barry Levinson has gathered a big ensemble cast of great actors including Aidan Quinn, Elizabeth Perkins, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Kevin Pollak, and Joan Plowright.

It's a multi-generational story of an immigrant Polish Jewish family in Baltimore. It's Levinson's semi-autobiographical film. As such, it has some funny slice-of-life scenes like the whole family gathered up to see the first TV and the only thing on is the test screen. The family first finds success in selling TV. Eventually the extended family scatter to the winds.

It has the grand scale and the feel of the era. It has some great bits of family stories. There are great actors, and Levinson is in charge. All the pieces are in place. This should be a masterpiece, but it's not quite there. The story just go on and on and on. There really isn't any flow that ramps up to a climax. It's just a series of interesting family vignettes coming one after the other. It goes on too long.

This is essentially Levinson's home movie reshot onto the big screen. As such it is the best home movie in anybody's dusty attics. But like all those home movies, it probably means more for people who remember those times than those of us who were never there.

This film has much to recommend it-set design, cinematography and so on- but what makes it truly shine is a marvelous script and an ensemble cast that almost uniformly turn in excellent work. The characters live and breathe and fair jump off the screen at the audience. You come to care about them, even the ones you don't like. It's an entrancing, riveting journey through the 20th century as it was lived by one family. Don't miss this one. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll even be nice to that cousin you can't stand or your daughter's current boyfriend,who you swear is from Pluto! Most exceedingly highly recommended!!!

The depth and complexity of Barry Levinson's tribute to America's Golden Age can be summed up by granddad Armin Mueller-Stahl's words of wisdom to the younger generation: "if you stop remembering, you forget". The writer director himself seems to have forgotten how memory is always prone to sentimental distortion, and his long, loving portrait of a family in transition (ostensibly Levinson's own extended family) plays like a lazy daydream of paradise lost. It's a far richer film than the first two chapters of his Baltimore trilogy, with a screenplay spanning three generations and most of the 20th century, but the dramatic scope comes at the expense of detail, and Levinson's explanation for the post-war decline of the American family is thus never able to reach beyond the most obvious culprits: television and suburban malaise. With help from an excellent ensemble cast the film is finally able to achieve the bittersweet mood it strives for, but only after burying some genuine emotion underneath too many visual flourishes and a lot of distracting big budget gloss.

I watch this movie without fail every thanksgiving even though it could also be a 4th of july movie. It's a bittersweet story of an immigrant family and a larger story of how families in America changed and mealtimes too.

Also the migration of people who moved from the cities to the suburbs.

The acting from everyone is stellar especially the older folks Mueller-Stahl & Dame Plowright. But i'm also a huge fan of Quinn, Pollak, Perkins, and Wood.

This movie is part two of a trilogy by Barry Levinson and naturally filmed in Baltimore. The first being Diner and the third Tinmen, all with different actors.

On paper, writer-director Barry Levinson's semi-autobiographical Avalon, which begins with the arrival of Polish Jew Sam Krichinsky (Armin Mueller- Stahl) in the Avalon area of Baltimore, Md., on July 4, 1914, and ends when he is in his dotage on another July 4 sometime in the sixties, is an intellectually crystalline epic about the demise of the extended family, the erosion of traditional American and European values, the growth of alienated suburban culture (organized around television) and the hegemony of materialism.

That's on paper. On screen, Avalon is unconscionably sloppy (the leaves of deciduous trees in Baltimore at Christmas are green on one block, yellow on another and non-existent on a third), structurally amorphous (the movie could end at any time or go on forever, which it seems to do), and gummily sentimental (grandparents and children are psychologically saintly). The lovely moments and fine performances in the picture can't redeem Levinson's technical carelessness - the editing is without rhythm, momentum, or even logic - nor can they compensate for Avalon's ethnographic toothlessness: imagine Mordecai Richler without the bite.

Levinson would have made Duddy Kravitz a mensch.

Avalon is more irritating than most ambitious failures because Levinson, winner of the best directing Oscar in 1988 for Rain Man, is wildly talented, and his two earlier semi-autobiographical films set in Baltimore, Diner and Tin Men, were twin peaks of Proustian purity. Structured lightly but soundly, in the esthetic version of aluminum, they vaulted over the twin valleys of bathos, sentimentality and nostalgia.

Avalon is a bridge made of lead.

But students of performance will want to see it for a quartet of reasons. The first is Armin Mueller-Stahl, the East German actor who came West in the late seventies and has not been within spitting distance of mediocrity since, whether as the tortured politician in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Lola, the complex farmer in Angry Harvest or Jessica Lange's mysterious father in Music Box. As written, Avalon's Sam Krichinsky is fundamentally a grandchild's adoring projection of a grandfather, but Mueller-Stahl's Prussian blue eyes bespeak more depth than the character is permitted to articulate; when the script does become bluntly pedantic, Mueller-Stahl subtly softens the blows. Sadly, even this great actor is done in at the end when he is plastered with outrageously inept old-age makeup. He looks like nothing less than a blue-eyed, Teutonic E.T. about to sing a geriatric variation of Cabaret's Nazi hymn, Tomorrow Belongs to Me: Yesterday Vas Mine.

The second extraordinary actor is Joan Plowright, the British widow of Laurence Olivier; she plays Eva Krichinsky, Sam's Polish-American wife, with a flawless accent, as if she had not done Shakespeare, Chekhov, John Osborne or Peter Greenaway, all of whom she has, of course, enlivened. But technique aside, she follows Mueller-Stahl in toughening up the soft edges and in softening the rough edges of a character verging on caricature; while certainly Jewish, her meddling mother-cum-grandmother is no stage- bound Jewish mother.

The most fully dramatized conflict in Avalon involves the grandparents and their relationship to their son Jules and his wife Ann (and eventually to the young couple's children), all of whom live together. Aidan Quinn, as the cautious and contemplative Jules, and Elizabeth Perkins, as the fun-loving but responsible Ann, complete the foursome of exceptional performances: he infuses an introvert with exterior life and she captures the spirit of femininity in the fifties with eerie exactitude, as if Life had come to life (it's an asset that she looks like the Judy Garland of that period).

Four fabulous musicians, less than fabulous music for them to play: the resonant sequences (an on-going Thanksgiving argument, for example) are regularly intercut with comic schtick, the most egregious instance being the purchase of a television set - would people interested enough in TV to buy one not know that during the day there were no programs? The purchasers sit in front of the box, watch the test pattern, get disgusted, and leave it to the kids. It's a funny bit, but it's fraudulent, and it corrodes Avalon, which is trying to do something new, with the stuff of deja-vu. There are two lines delivered by Eva that express the irritation Avalon engenders: "How many times do we have to hear this story? We all heard it before." Benjamin MIller, Filmbay Editor

Avalon is one of those rare precious jewels that become more beautiful each time you view it. My family watches Avalon every Thanksgiving, and usually a few other times during the year as well. Every time we watch it, we discover new insights. I encourage all to take the time to experience this piece of priceless art.

As quite a few people have pointed out, this will especially appeal to people who migrated to other countries. It doesn't have to be the USA, it could be the people who came to Germany after the second world war or other countries. With Armin M. Stahl you have a heavyweight actor, but you also get Elijah Wood as a kid. Who knows if someone thought he'd become famous like that, back then?

The title of course is a clue in itself, but the movie is nicely paced drama. I only watched it this year (at the Berlin International Festival) but I think the impact the movie has, still works. It didn't lose anything over the years. Hopefully you are in the right state of mind, while watching it

Wonderful in so many ways but unfortunately overlong and a bit boring. Great cast. Great vignettes. But watch Radio Days if you want a more enjoyable experience offered same scenario.

Typical Barry Levinson, which means safe, tasteful, lacklustre and fairly dull.

An episodic journey across several generations of an immigrant family seeking the American dream. There's lots of syrupy music meant to invoke a vague nostalgia. There are any number of shots clearly intended to impress us with their iconic imagery (like the one shown on the film's poster). It's certainly a quality film, but not one for which I can muster up much enthusiasm.

I must not be the target audience for Barry Levinson movies, because I feel the same way about all of them.

Grade: B

I have shown this movie in entry-level college geography classes, as it is first of all a fine film, but second because it so clearly illustrates concepts of acculturation, assimilation and the American "melting pot." The story certainly could be told, and re-told, from a number of other perspectives (i.e., another city, another ethnicity, even a different starting decade), but despite its length, Avalon captures so much of a way of life in our country that has eroded throughout time. College freshmen, on the whole, seem to really enjoy this film, and papers that I ask them to write on it have been thoughtful and provocative.

The story is multi-generational, and centers on an immigrant arriving in Baltimore, MD in the early 1900s. It then traces his life forward through the generations, all the while noting how the impact of being in a new country changes him and his descendants. The cast does a fine job, Levinson's direction is superb, but pay attention to subtle nuances! This is one of those films that I can pick up something different every time I watch it.

Highly recommended.

This film is a powerful depiction of the loss of innocence experienced by so many immigrants who came to this country, believing it was a veritable promised land. Slowly and subtly, Levinson shows how their once close families are pulled apart by the demands of the culture. From the flight of the middle class to the suburbs and the loss of traditional business values, the transformations our society underwent in the post-war period are captured here with masterful storytelling. Watch how television gradually becomes the center of the home, rather than the family table. The turkey scene, as funny as it is, is profound. The extended family is falling apart, as the geographical distance afforded by the automobile grows.

The acting is tremendous. The performances of Quinn, Perkins, Muehler-Stahl and Plowright are worth the purchase alone. But don't miss young Elijah Wood in his first major film role.

This movie is one to treasure and revisit year after year--how about at Thanksgiving... :)

Avalon is one of only two movies that I paid to see in a movie theater, but walked out on. It was putting me to sleep. The movie's pace drags. Maybe it got better in the 2nd half, but you couldn't buy coffee in movie theaters in those days, and I didn't have any caffeine pills.

Avalon is really a beautifully written story and Levinson's cast is excellent. This really is one of the better stories of the American experience. Actually I'd have to say it's the BEST story of the American experience ever brought to film. I say that knowing that it really is the urban Jewish-American experience and not one that is necessarily shared by other groups. I dont care for rigid definitions of the American experience because it can be a vastly differing one. Having said that though, I must still say that Avalon is a wonderful chronicling of an American immigrant family originaly from Eastern Europe who put down roots in the Avalon section of Baltimore. It is refreshing in that New York City is generally credited for this kind of narrative. So much so that it's easy to forget that ethnic communities sprang up in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco etc. Not just NYC. Through the narration of Sam Krichinsky we see his children and grandchildren grow up and he grow old. We are with him when his wife (Joan Plowright)passes away, When his son's business is destroyed by fire, when he argues with his oldest Brother and a great rift divides the Krichinskys forever. we hear his stories of this and that and always he returns to the 4th of July 1914 when he arrived in Baltimore for the first time. Levinson is fantastic as he films what is obviously an idealized representation seen only in Sam Krichinsky's "rose colored" memory of the event. There is so much poignance, sorrow, and love in "Avalon" and small details become deeply profound moments in the life of an elderly man struggling to remember the good times while the world moves on. The closing scene in which Sam's Grandson (now a father himself), with whom he has always had a close relationship, visits him in a nursing home. We know from Sam's state that the end cannot be far. Its a brief scene with little dialogue but it is AWESOME!!!! in the sublime way it conveys it's message. I choke up just thinking about that scene. See "Avalon"!!!

I have watched Avalon seven times now. From the second time on, I promised myself that I wouldn't cry at the end, but I did. No other film is like that for me. This is the film analog of The Great American Novel. Barry Levinson illustrates the fundamental American experience of immigration, assimilation, disintegration and shows us all of its facets through one representative family. This 1990 film got a batch of nominations. Only the Writers Guild of America gave Levinson its award for best screenplay written directly for the screen. It wasn't nominated for a best-picture Oscar, which went to Dances With Wolves. The Oscar for best screenplay written directly for the screen went to Ghost. I believe that, in time, Avalon will become a cult favorite and critics will wonder how this extraordinary artwork was overlooked for so long.

What a great film of an immigrant family in America and the changes that take place over generations. This is Levinson's account of his family in his beloved Baltimore. This was a time in America when extended families were the norm and the holidays that unified them. Points up the intrusion of technology (television) in putting distant between people. The film is told in a loving manner and speaks to a time in America that has long disappeared in conjunction with the country's flight from the inner city to the suburbs. Good ensemble cast and Randy Newman's score is great. Don't miss this under-appreciated feel-good movie!

This is really great well deserving of an oscar-nomination. I'm so jealous of Sam for seeing America for the first time on July 4th.(What excellent photography) Every American should be able to see America like Sam Krichinsky. It would make you a better person you would not take it for granted. This is one of eight Levinson movies I own and I've seen them all except for "Young Sherlock Holmes" Great Job Barry.