Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Lian Lunson
Kyle says: “SING ME THE SONGS THAT SAY I LOVE YOU is a documentary of the May 2011 Town Hall concert in New York in loving memory of Kate McGarrigle by Rufus and Martha Wainwright, her children with singer/songwriter Loudon
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Rating: 1.5 cats
Director: Richie Mitchell
Starring: Allison Dawn Doiron | Farid Yazdani | Jeremy Larter | Richard Guppy | Stephen Jacob Hogan
Jason says: “If the initials in S.I.N. THEORY stand for anything specific, I don’t believe it is revealed in the movie, which is too bad. They imply material that’s more salacious and exciting than what’s on screen, and the movie
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Rating: 4.6
Director: Ben Wheatley
Starring: Alice Lowe | Eileen Davies | Kenneth Hadley | Richard Lumsden | Steve Oram
Jason says: “Ben Wheatley’s previous two films weren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and he hasn’t exactly gone conventional with SIGHTSEERS. It’s quite often as funny as it is twisted (or, perhaps, vice versa), overflowing with strange, messy, disturbing romantic comedy.
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Josh Greenbaum
Jason says: “It feels like it’s been a while since a documentary about kids who do something well and compete to see who does it the best has worked its way into a decent number of theaters, and THE SHORT
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Rating: 4.9
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Starring: Brie Larson | John Gallagher | Kaitlyn Dever | Keith Stanfield | Kevin Hernandez | Rami Malek
Chris says: “On the TV series United States of Tara, Brie Larson excelled at playing a complicated teenager: initially shallow and self-absorbed, over three seasons her character convincingly grew into a somewhat wiser, if still searching young adult. Still, if
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Takashi Miike
Starring: Goro Kishitani | Kento Nagayama | Masato Ibu | Nanako Matsushima | Takao Osawa | Tatsuya Fujiwara | Tsutomu Yamazaki
Jason says: “I thought I’d seen it all from Takashi Miike – for a guy who started out doing quick, strange, direct-to-video crime movies, he’s certainly seemed to do have done everything, from gross-out horror to whimsical adaptations of popular
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: James Marsh
Starring: Andrea Riseborough | Brid Brennan | Clive Owen | David Wilmot | Domhall Gleeson | Gillian Anderson
Jason says: “There’s a twenty-year jump early in SHADOW DANCER, from 1973 to 1993, and another twenty years between then and the present day, and there’s something appealing about that sort of symmetry, especially with the reminders in the background
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Drew Tobia
Starring: Dana Eskelson | Eleanore Pienta | Keisha Zollar | Molly Plunk
Jason says: “I know a fair amount of people who tend to judge movies in large part based on how much they agree with how the characters act. I suspect most of us do so a little more than we’d
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Mary Jane Doherty
Jason says: “For someone who has never been to the ballet, I sure tend to find a lot of movies involving the combination of art and athleticism fascinating. Maybe it’s the way that the intense discipline necessary to master the
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Jang Cheol-soo
Starring: Kim Soo-hyun | Ko Chang-seok | Lee Hyun-woo | Park Hye-sook | Park Ki-woong
Jason says: “It happens all the time: An action-comedy starts out funny, but when building to a climax, the action so completely takes over that the thing that got the audience hooked at the beginning is almost completely lost. SECRETLY
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Ronny Yu
Starring: Adam Cheng siu-Chow | Ady Ang Yi-Xuan | Ekin Cheng | Fu Xinbo | Shao Bing | Vic Chou | Wu Chan
Jason says: “The tale of the Yang Clan is something special, even in a culture already packed full of martial legends. Its combined simplicity and grandeur makes it an excellent source for Ronny Yu’s latest, and apparent labor of love
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Rating: 2 cats
Director: Annette Heywood-Carter
Starring: Bradley Whitford | Chiwetel Ejiofor | Hal Holbrook | Jaimie Alexander | Jim Caviezel
Jason says: “As with many movies based on true stories, SAVANNAH ends with a few screens of text summing up the lives and accomplishments of its subjects, and for Ward Allen it states that he was an eloquent advocate of
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: James Franco
Starring: James Franco | Jim Parrack | Raymond T. Williams | Trevor Neuhoff | Val Lauren | Vince Jolivette
Kyle says: “Oscar-nominated actor, director, painter, sculptor, poet, essayist, novelist, installation artist, famous college student and occasional professor, currently Gucci men’s perfume spokesperson, and soon-to-be Broadway play director James Franco is steadily amassing an intriguing body of work as cinema
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Keishi Ohtomo
Starring: Emi Takei | Munetaka Aoki | Takeru Satô | Taketo Tanaka | Teruyuki Kagawa | Yû Aoi
Jason says: “RUROUNI KENSHIN PART ONE: ORIGINS is a comic-book movie, not just in the sense that it’s adapted from a popular manga, but in how it both aims to introduce a lot of favorite elements and tell the story
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Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Barbara Kopple
Chris says: “Mariel Hemingway is an accomplished actress in her own right—she even received an Academy Award nomination while in her teens for Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN. However, before anything else, most people will identify her as Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter and
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Rating: 2 cats
Director: Alex Karpovsky
Starring: Alex Karpovsky | Amanda Good Hennessey | Dakota Shepard | Dennis Staroselsky | Jaime Ray Newman
Jason says: “It doesn’t happen very often, but RUBBERNECK is almost too simple to classify. It’s got characteristics of both a thriller and an indie drama of the character-study variety, but the only thing that seems unique about it is
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Rodney Ascher
Chris says: “Remember when someone first stumbled across how eerily Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album synced up to the first forty or so minutes of THE WIZARD OF OZ? With the band denying any intentional links
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Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Jay Chou
Starring: Eric Tsang Chi-wai | Huang Huai-chen | Huang Jun-lang | Oh Yau-lun | Song Jian-zhang | Wang Xue-qi
Jason says: “THE ROOFTOP is overstuffed, like Jay Chou had a half-dozen ideas for his 1960s Taiwanese musical project and couldn’t decide exactly which ones he wanted to use. So he threw in all of them, even if they don’t
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Giulla Brazzale | Luca Immesi
Starring: Alejandro Jodorowsky | Anna Bonasso | Cosimo Cinieri | Désirée Giorgetti | Ivan Franek | Nicola Arabi
Jason says: “RITUAL: A PSYCHOMAGIC STORY is explicitly inspired by the work and philosophy of Alejandro Jodorowsky, and many may find themselves disappointed that, after a very stylish opening, it is never in the same category of strangeness as Jodorowsky’s
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Gilles Bourdos
Starring: Christa Théret | Michel Bouquet | Michèle Gleizer | Romane Bohringer | Thomas Doret | Vincent Rottiers
Jason says: “I’m certain that I must, at some point, learned that famed Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and noted filmmaker Jean Renoir were father and son. Somehow the information failed to stick, so re-learning that bit of information was kind
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