• Save on the new film Love's Unfolding Dream, or save 47% on the other films based on Janette Oke's novels.
  
  
• Save up to 50% on TV DVDs in our Spring TV Event. Find titles under $10 or get two great shows for as little as $25. Shop now.
  
  

Buy this DVD with The Basketball Diaries DVD ~ Leonardo DiCaprio today!

Total List Price: $37.97 Buy Together Today: $27.98

This Boy's Life DVD ~ Robert De Niro  (70)

Marvin's Room DVD ~ Meryl Streep  (90)  $9.99

The Beach DVD ~ Robert Carlyle  (217)

What's Eating Gilbert Grape (Special Collector's Edition) DVD ~ Johnny Depp  (216)  $10.49

Gangs of New York (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) DVD ~ Roger Ashton-Griffiths  (412)  $9.99

› Explore similar items : Movies & TV (50)

Amazon.com
This biographical account of the tempestuous, taboo-shattering love affair between two 19th century French poets--Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio)--didn't do much at the box office when it was released in 1995. But after the success of Titanic, it became somewhat infamous when Playgirl magazine announced its intention to publish nude pictures of DiCaprio taken from the film. (Nobody much seemed to care that Thewlis, who also starred in Mike Leigh's Naked, also appears nude in Total Eclipse.) The truth is, the nudity in question only lasts for a few frames, but it's certainly in character for the young wild-man Rimbaud.

Directed by Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa, The Secret Garden), Total Eclipse begins in 1870 when the newly married Verlaine is 24 and Rimbaud is 17. The volatile combination of their reckless passions, idiosyncratic talents, and obnoxious egos is a recipe for disaster--and l'amour fou--culminating in a two-year prison term for Verlaine who was convicted of sodomy. DiCaprio's work in this film (as well as This Boy's Life, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, and The Basketball Diaries) proves he is a serious actor who's interested in risky, challenging work--not just the matinee idol he became in the wake of Titanic. --Jim Emerson

From The New Yorker
Unwatchable. The obsessive, destructive love affair of the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, as envisioned by director Agnieszka Holland and screenwriter Christopher Hampton, was an opera of mutual abuse, without humor or romantic passion. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rimbaud as a drunken club kid, running wild over the well-dressed sets; David Thewlis's Verlaine is a parody of his magnificent creep in "Naked," ranting and raving dementedly about life. The movie is filled with so many hysterical let's-trash-the-hotel-room scenes that the audience goes numb. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker