Released 1997
Stars Ian Holm, Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose, Peter Donaldson, Bruce Greenwood
Directed by Atom Egoyan

A cold, dark hillside looms above the Bide-a-Wile Motel, pressing down on it, crushing out the life with the gray weight of winter. It is one of the strongest images in Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter,'' which takes place in a small Canadian town, locked in by snow and buried in grief after 14 children are killed in a school bus accident.

Egoyan's film, based on the novel by Russell Banks, is not about the tragedy of dying, but about the grief of surviving. He's a director whose films coil through time and double back to take a second look at the lives of their characters. It is typical of his approach that "The Sweet Hereafter'' neither begins nor ends with the bus falling through the ice of a frozen lake, and is not really about how the accident happened, or who was to blame. The accident is like the snow clouds, always there, cutting off the characters from the sun, a vast fact nobody can change.

This is one of the best films of the year, an unflinching lament for the human condition. Yes, it is told out of sequence, but not as a gimmick: In a way, Egoyan has constructed this film in the simplest possible way. It isn't about the beginning and end of the plot, but about the beginning and end of the emotions. In his first scene, the lawyer tells his daughter he doesn't know who he's talking to. In one of his closing scenes, he remembers a time when he did know her. But what did it get him?

Summary by Roger Ebert