poor quality DVD
I bought a previously viewed August Rush DVD and tried it in two different players. Neither machine could read the disc. The DVD was a complete waste and should not have been available for purchase.

Beautiful Soundtrack and Story
I love this movie. The combination of the storyline and the music has won me over. My background as an adopted child makes this story close to my heart. It also reminds someone that life is always intertwined, whether you are aware of it or not. It inspires me to stay aware, so that someday I can see how my life has intertwined with around individuals.

August Rush
I have emailed twice now and have never received any response from the seller nor Amazon . I have always sworn by Amazon and yet I cannot get any one to email me. I have NEVER received this DVD and I keep asking where it is. Can someone HELP me.

5 stars? 4 stars? How much belief should we suspend?
I find it interesting that there are so many high ratings for this movie, while at the same time reviewers frequently acknowledge that this movie is full of enough holes to wonder if the swiss cheese industry was somehow involved in making it. Why is this so acceptable to so many, have we not seen movies of this type done much more effectively?

August Rush is set around the feel-good magic of mystical musical bonds that occur between 3 of the 4 main characters of the movie; a family physically separated but spiritually aware of one-another. Their link is pure wondrous fantasy and there's nothing wrong with that, but then we are presented with the mechanism with which the 3 will be united -- it is there that I find a huge difficulty in liking this movie.

I love music as a listener and performer and have always felt that it has a magical quality to it. But a good fantasy (for me) always takes an element of magic, such as the mystical musical bond between Lyla and her son and her one-night-stand lover, and presents its protagonist with some sort of challenge to perfect the magic.

Yet no fantasy challenge arises. Lyla's son, Evan, is simply magical, except when he's not. His instant, and I do mean instant guitar and pipe organ playing skills and musical notation skills were pure fantasy without effort. Evan, aka August Rush picks up a guitar for the first time and channels the ghost of Michael Hedges (check him out if you liked Evan's style of guitar playing; frankly, I was offended by the artistic rip-off as the music that Evan just pulls out thin air is very technically demanding and was invented by the late Mr. Hedges). He is befriended by a kindly reverend and a young girl, a refugee in the church, and immediately learns how to read and score music with no tutelage. There were opportunities to spend a few movie minutes here and there to make Evan's transformation from a non-musician to a guitar playing god more believable, but the director went for a lazy prefab genius/magic boy route more often then not. Even when Evan/August winds up a musical "student" at his mother's alma-mater, Julliard, he is shown to be teaching the teachers almost from the get-go; no strain to perfect his magical musical ability.

But there is something, nay, somebody in Evan's way, somebody preventing him from uniting with his mystically gathering family. That somebody is a money-grubbing, lost-soul ex-musician, played by Robin Williams. This promising character could have added much more to the story. How did he lose his soul, could he get it back? Did he have a mystical tie to Evan's parents other than mere happenstance? In what way was his nickname, the Wizard, warranted? We'll never know, the character is instead used as a throw away impediment to Evan's quest to find family. And is about as menacing as a junk yard dog on a leash when he's not being a sympathetic character. In short, the "wizard's" story is a tepid voyage to nowhere.

So August Rush veers between reality and pure fantasy, with neither faction presented with any sort of conviction -- no hint of real struggle or conquest or even surprise as Evan is united with his mother and father at the end.

Great heart-warming spiritual premise merits two and a half stars, but the vision is sorely muddled by the half-baked efforts of the writers and director.

Warning: Willful suspension of disbelief required
I like this movie, a lot. But as other reviewers have said, some of the elements in the story just don't make sense, and to expect the audience to accept them as mere coincidences is almost ridiculous. Another thing that really bugs me that I haven't really seen anyone else mention is that some of "Lyla's" reactions are a bit contrived. For instance, during a desparate search for her son, when she is just trying to figure out who he is, what his name is, what he looks like, etc., a social worker does a bit of research and within minutes (and this is the NYC social system we're talking about) produces a picture of him, while she simultaneously is drawn to a bulletin board where she moves a few papers out of the way and finds a flyer about him and just seems to "know" that it's him. (Wow!! Isn't that neat??) Anyway, her reaction is almost silly. The social worker says, "Here he is" (holding up a picture of him) and her response is a thoughtful "Yeah". And what about her reaction at the end when Lewis comes up to her, after all that time apart, after all of that longing and thinking they were never going to see each other again, and her reaction is a spacy stare followed by a silly laugh?? Huh?? Also, the ending itself is just terrible. We're left with the mom and dad, who have just miraculously reunited at August's concert, holding hands, and the boy staring at them from the stage. This is a deep movie (for me) which requires some level of emotional commitment to really engage, so to be left with an ending like that is almost maddening. Equally maddening are all of the unanswered questions the audience is left with. For example, what was it that made Lyla leave Lewis shouting her name in the street to get into a car and drive away with her father? It's fairly obvious that her father said something to her, and by the look on her face it was something heavy, but we're left not knowing. All I can say is that this must have been an amateur director. To leave this on a positive note, the music is pretty amazing, and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers actually sang the songs they show him singing. Who knew he had such a great voice? He and Keri Russell had great chemistry.