Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.75 cats
Director: Hirokazu Koreeda
Starring: Cara Uchida | Kanna Hashimoto | Koki Maeda | Ohshirô Maeda | Rento Isobe | Ryôga Hayashi
Thom says: “Director Koreeda is a huge festival favorite having been lauded for such films as AFTER LIFE, NOBODY KNOWS, & STILL WALKING (already a part of the Criterion Collection). The story is reasonably simple here, but very sweet and
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Rating: 2 cats
Director: Travis Mathews
Starring: Ben Jasper | Brontez Purnell | Jesse Metzger | Jorge Rodolfo | Keith McDonald | Peter DeGroot | Wayne Bumb
Thom says: “This is your below average gay hard-core mumble core movie. Jess has lived in San Francisco for nearly a decade and his finances have got the better of him and he’s moving back to Ohio. It’s going to
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Anka Sasnal | Wilhelm Sasnai
Starring: Agnieszka Podsiadli | Dawid Wolski | Elzbieta Okupska | Jerzy Lapinski | Marcin Czarnik | Piotr Nowak
Bruce says: “****SPOILERS**** “This seems to be the season for wonderful, beautifully made films that cannot be recommended for everyone. Sparse in dialogue IT LOOKS PRETTY FROM A DISTANCE brings to mind disparate fare such as HUKKLE; GOODBYE, DRAGON INN;
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Gakuryu Ishii
Starring: Asato Iida | Eri Aoki | Hakka Shiraishi | Keisuke Hasebe | Mai Takahashi | Rin Takanashi | Yumika Tajima
Jason says: “It is, I suppose, unfair to judge this picture for not being conventional enough; it’s meant to be unusual and relatively plot-free. The question is, if you strip the basic building block of story away, what’s left? ISN’T
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Kirby Dick
Michael says: “Kirby Dick won the Chlotrudis Award for Best Documentary with his film THIS FILM IS NOT YET RATED. Now he tackles sexual violence in the military with the same intensity and passion. This film is tough to watch,
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Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo
Starring: Carice van Houten | Clive Owen | Daniel Brühl | Ella Izán Corchero | Kerry Fox | Pilar López de Ayala
Jason says: “It’s hard too believe that INTRUDERS is just Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s third feature film; the past decade-plus has been pretty good for Spanish genre filmmakers whether working in their native tongue or English, and Fresnadillo’s 2001 film INTACTO
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Eric Toledano | Olivier Nakache
Starring: Anne Le Ny | Audrey Fleurot | Christian Ameri | Clotide Mollet | Dorothée Brière | François Cluzet | Omar Sy
Bruce says: “THE INTOUCHABLES has been a box office sensation in France. It also has received high enough ratings to currently rank #78 on IMDb’s top 250 films. Fortunately I knew very little about the film beforehand so I arrived
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Francois Ozon
Starring: Bastien Ughetto | Emmanuelle Seigner | Ernst Umhauer | Fabrice Luchini | Kristin Scott Thomas
Bruce says: “I’ve said it before – François Ozon is one of those filmmakers whose skills are immense but has yet to produce the masterpiece showcasing his talent. IN THE HOUSE is an expository film, one that centers on the
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Mia Donovan
Jason says: “Hey, festivals, I know all I really want to know about the porn industry. Really, you can stop screening docs about it and films that are set there; folks give me funny looks after I tell them what
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Ti West
Starring: Alison Bartlett | Jake Ryan | Kelly McGillis | Lena Dunham | Pat Healy | Sara Paxton
Jason says: “Ti West knows how to make his audience jump, which isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds. Harder, though, is leading up to those jumps with light comedy and deep shivers, and West pulls that off, too. The
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Starring: Agnieszka Grochowska | Benno Fürmann | Herbert Knaup | Maria Schrader | Robert Wieckiewicz
Bruce says: “Agnieszka Holland’s most acclaimed film – EUROPA, EUROPA – featured a young Jewish man who posed as a Hitler Youth to avoid his inevitable annihilation. With IN DARKNESS she returns to the holocaust once again. Nominated for a
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Rating: 4.75 cats
Director: Bart Layton
Jason says: “The very title of THE IMPOSTER seems like it might be giving the game away, but it’s not hard to argue that this is entirely appropriate. Director Bart Layton opts to make the film a mystery only after
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Robert Pulcini | Shari Springer Berman
Starring: Annette Bening | Darren Criss | June Diane Raphael | Kristen Wiig | Matt Dillon | Natasha Lyonne
Thom says: “Directors Berman & Pulcini have a good track record with AMERICAN SPLENDOR, THE NANNIE DIARIES, & THE EXTRA MAN all worth checking out and while this film registers more of a sit-com script it still offers a bellyful
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Ariel Vroman
Starring: Chris Evans | David Schwimmer | James Franco | Michael Shannon | Ray Liotta | Stephen Dorff | Winona Ryder
Thom says: “This is a nasty little film that certainly knows how to entertain once you get past the content. I’ve never seen any of Vroman’s previous output but I can say he’s done a very professional job here. Shannon
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Rating: 3.3 cats
Director: Gary Ross
Starring: Elizabeth Banks | Jennifer Lawrence | Liam Hemsworth | Stanley Tucci | Wes Bentley | Willow Shields
Thom says: “No real reason to review this but I had nothing to do one afternoon in Seattle. I’m not a fan of the TWILIGHT series and this is even worse. 12 boys and 12 girls are chosen from the
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Director: Paul Hough
Starring: Brianna Lauren Jackson | Eddie McGee | Fred Cour | Paul McCarthy-Boyington | T. Arthur Cottam | Trista Robinson
Jason says: “It’s an obvious thing to say in a review, and probably everyone who writes a review of this movie will say some variation, but what the heck: THE HUMAN RACE kicks a fair amount of ass even though
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Rating: 4.75 cats
Director: David France
Bruce says: “HOW TO SURVIVE A PLAGUE serves as a textbook for the pros and cons of various mechanisms surrounding a social movement responding to a crisis. ACT UP was founded in 1987 by a group of people who felt
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Hanan Kattan | Shamim Sarif
Bruce says: “Walls, barricades, checkpoints, barbed wire fences. These are prominent features in the West bank landscape and the areas that Palestinians must traverse to get from a refugee camp to a Palestinian village twenty five kilometers away. This fifteen
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Kôji Fukada
Starring: Bryerly Long | Eriko Ono | Haruka Saito | Hiroko Matsuda | Kanji Furutachi | Kumi Hyôdô | Tatsuya Kawamura
Thom says: “This unsentimental winner is yet one more great representative of the Film Movement visionary picks. This might well have come from the family-orientation oeuvre of an Ozu until we realize that this film will veer off into wacky
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Leos Carax
Starring: Denis Levant | Edith Scob | Eva Mendes | Kylie Minogue | Leos Carax | Michel Piccoli
Chris says: “Honestly one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, and perhaps one of the most wonderful. In his first feature in over a decade, filmmaker Leos Carax(THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE), along with his regular collaborator, the wiry
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