Eloquently and dramatically based on the bestselling book.

Roger Ebert (Four Stars):

How long has it been since you saw a movie that succeeds as pure story? That doesn't depend on stars, effects or genres, but simply fascinates you with how it will turn out? Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner," based on a much-loved novel, is a movie like that. It superimposes human faces and a historical context on the tragic images of war from Afghanistan....

What happens back in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) in the year 2000 need not be revealed here, but the scenes combine great suspense with deep emotion. One emblematic moment: A soccer game where the audience, all men and all oddly silent, is watched by guards with rifles. The film works so deeply on us because we have been so absorbed by its story, by its destinies, by the way these individuals become so important that we are forced to stop thinking of "Afghans" as simply a category of body counts on the news.

The movie is acted largely in English, although many (subtitled) scenes are in Dari, which I learn is an Afghan dialect of Farsi, or Persian. The performances by the actors playing Amir and Hassan as children are natural, convincing and powerful; recently I have seen several such child performances that adults would envy for their conviction and strength. Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, as young Hassan, is particularly striking, with his serious, sometimes almost mournful face. (The boy now fears Afghan reprisals for appearing in the rape scene, and the producers have helped to relocate him.)

One of the areas in which the movie succeeds is in its depiction of kite flying. Yes, it uses special effects, but they function to represent what freedom and exhilaration the kites represent to their owners. I remember my own fierce identification with my own kites as a child. I was up there; I was represented. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the kite flyer (Amir) and the kite runner (Hassan). Perhaps that sad wisdom in Hassan's eyes comes from his certainty that all must fall to earth, sooner or later.

This is a magnificent film by Marc Forster, now 38, who since "Monster's Ball" (2001) has made "Finding Neverland" (2004), "Stay" (2005) and "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006). All fine work, but "The Kite Runner" equals "Monster's Ball" in its emotional impact. Like "House of Sand and Fog" and "Man Push Cart," it helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.