Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Mohammad Rasoulof
Starring: Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy | Leyla Zareh | Roya Taymourian | Shahab Hosseini
Michael says: “Saw my first film at the New Directors/New Films Festival in NYC this weekend, and it was powerful. Noora is a young woman living in Iran who is in some sort of trouble. She has been barred from
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Carlos Sorin
Starring: Alejandro Awada | Victoria Almeida
Bruce says: “Carlos Sorin returns to Patagonia, the setting of his wistful 2004 film BOMBÓN: EL PERRO. One might call GONE FISHING a double road story. The main character Mario (Alejandro Awada) is on the road to recovery and is
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Rating: 3.4
Director: Bobcat Goldthwait
Starring: Joel Murray | Mackenzie Brooke Smith | Melinda Page Hamilton | Rich McDonald | Tara Lynne Barr
Thom says: “Another TIFF entry that I had ridiculously high expectations for that crashed me back to Earth. I loved Goldthwait’s WORLD’S GREATEST DAD so much that I included it in my TOP 10 for 2009 so this was certain
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Ya-che Yang
Starring: Chang Hsiao-chuan | Gwei Lun-mei | Rhydian Vaughan
Jason says: “By odd happenstance, GIRLFRIEND BOYFRIEND (GF*BF, by the title appearing on-screen) is the second Taiwanese film I’ve seen in as many weeks to start its characters in high school and follow them to the present, and it turns
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Rating: 4.6
Director: Ashley Sabin | David Redmon
Jason says: “When one sees a documentary with a title like GIRL MODEL on a festival schedule, it’s probably not a bad idea to schedule a little time between it and the next film to wash a bit of the
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Chris McCawley | Jim Morrison | Jim Munroe | Tate Young
Starring: Jason Wrubell | Jonah Hundert | Kelly Spilchak | Rachel MacMillan | Sean Lerner | Taylor Katz
Jason says: “The ‘ghosts’ of this movie’s title are not supernatural; ‘gwai lo’ in Cantonese is both the word for ghost and slang for white/foreign people, and since this movie posits a future where the Western economies have collapsed… Well,
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Victor Ginzburg
Starring: Andrey Fomin | Mikhail Efremov | Sergey Shnurov | Vladimir Epifantsev | Vladimir Menshov
Bruce says: “The USA started the ball rolling with HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING in 1967 (based on the Broadway show that debuted six years earlier) and Canada gave us THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ in 1974.
Read the review...Gebo and the Shadow (Portugal/France; 95 min.) directed by: Manoel de Oliveira starring: Michael Lonsdale; Claudia Cardinale; Leonor Silveira; Jeanne Moreau; Ricardo Trêpa Bruce says: “This film was my biggest disappointment at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Just when
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Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Jonathan Lisecki
Starring: Charlie Barnett | Christian Coulson | Dulé Hill | Jenn Harris | Jonathan Lisecki | Matthew Wilkas
Bruce says: “In Provincetown I described GAYBY as a gay Judd Apatow film, thinking that was a terse description. I did not mean my comment to be pejorative in any way but it did prevent at least one friend from
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Rating: 2.75
Director: Kaushik Mukherjee
Starring: Anubrata Basu | Joyraj Bhattacharya | Kamalika Banerjee | Rii | Shilajit Majumdar
Jason says: “GANDU is almost more interesting for what it is – an ‘anti-Bollywood’ movie – than as a movie with characters and story and all. Shot in stark black-and-white, and musically propelled by hard-edged Bengali rap, it focuses on
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Rating: 1.75
Director: Michael Hoffman
Starring: Alan Rickman | Cameron Diaz | Cloris Leachman | Colin Firth | Stanley Tucci | Tom Courtenay
Jason says: “It’s a horrible thing when a caper movie doesn’t come off. The great ones are casual and precise in a way that seems to come as much from alchemy as chemistry, and when that doesn’t happen, it seems
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Rating: 3.8 cats
Starring: Alex Maizus | Brandon Waltz | Charles Kwame Odei | Dylan Hartigan | Jordan Puzzo | Kevin Corrigan | Kevin McManus | Matthew McManus
Jason says: “You don’t really need that much of a hook for a coming-of-age film – they’re more or less going to cover the same territory, albeit in different ways – but it doesn’t hurt to have one. That way,
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Tim Cawley
Chris says: “Creativity is nebulous; what inspires and motivates us often varies maddeningly from one artist to another, making it near impossible to form a general hypothesis on how people create. And yet, certain motifs and a collective camaraderie emerges
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Rating: 3.25
Director: Brandon Trost | Jason Trost
Starring: Art Hu | Brandon Barrera | Caitlyn Folley | James DeBello | Jason Trost | Lee Valmassy | Nick Principe
Jason says: “THE FP is the sort of flick that is precisely built to appeal to a certain category of movie fans, who are often surprised when it doesn’t do much for others. I have no doubt that it will
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Aleksei Fedorchenko | Harmony Korine | Jan Kwiecinski
Starring: al Kilmer | Darya Ekamasova | Igor Sergeev | Justyna Wasilewska | Pawel Smagala | Pawel Tomaszewski | Rachel Korine | Tomasz Tyndyk
Jason says: “The makers of this anthology were given dozens of instructions that ranged from restrictive to twee, or so the legend goes, although ultimately they had a fair amount of leeway so long as they made a movie on
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Joshua Sanchez
Starring: Aja Naomi King | E.J. Bonilla | Emory Cohen | Kathryn Meisle | Wendell Pierce
Thom says: “This is an amazingly problematic, thoughtful, but off-putting film. It’s a 4-character study that starts out with a middle-age roly-poly African American salesman, Joe, having an assignation with a white 15-year-old-boy, June. Wendell Pierce, who anyone that loves
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Ela Thier
Starring: Dalena Le | Laura Camien | Noa Rotstein | Udi Razzin | Virginia Hastings
Thom says: “The essence of this Film Movement experience is a beautiful one but the awkward interpretation brought it down a peg for me. Ellie. a young girl from Israel, has moved to the United States in the 1980s because
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Takashi Miike
Starring: Emi Takei | Ito Ono | Sakura Andô | Satoshi Tsumbuki | Takumi Saito | Tsuyoshi Ihara
Jason says: “FOR LOVE’S SAKE is the sort of crazy mix of adolescent emotions that seem over-the-top when you describe it, often going from pure sweetness to eye-rolling to angry violence in the very same scene. It’s just what one
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Rating: 3.8 cats
Director: Joseph Cedar
Starring: Albert Iluz | Alma Zack | Lior Ashkenazi | Shlomo Bar-Aba | Yuval Scharf
Chris says: “An Israeli father and son, both well-versed scholars in Talmudic studies, experience conflict when one is mistakenly awarded a prestigious annual prize that was actually meant for the other. The mistaken winner, however, is unaware of the mistake.
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Justin Calen Chenn
Starring: Brad Roller | Laura Waddell | Napoleon Ryan | Paris Benjamin | Paulie Rojas | Rachel Rath | Sherill Turner
Jason says: “FOLKLORE is the sort of comedy that will, over the course of the film, tell the audience about a hundred jokes in the hope that enough hit to make the whole thing worth it. It’s got a hit
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