Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Henry Joost | Jody Lee Lipes
Starring: Adam Hendrickson | Amar Ramasar | Brittany Pollack | Rebecca Krohn | Tiler Peck
Jason says: “Is ballet the least-appreciated major art form in America? To perform it demands the physical fitness and training of a professional athlete and the skills a professional actor. The music is often lively, and the choreography is intricate,
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Rating: 4.75 cats
Director: Philipp Stölzl
Starring: Benno Fürmann | Florian Lukas | Georg Friedrich | Johanna Wokalek | Simon Schwarz | Ulrich Tukur
Jason says: “I saw a poster advertising a mini festival of ‘climbing movies’ in the same theater where I saw NORTH FACE, and the fact that most of us can instantly deduce what that means probably counts as a strike
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Irving Schwartz
Starring: Dawn Noel Pignuola | icole LaLiberte | Naama Kates | Ty Jones
Jason says: “MY NORMALl is thoroughly enjoyable, but I’ve got to be honest: It might come off as just another talky indie/mumblecore film if half the cast of characters were not lesbian dominatrices. “Take Natalie (Nicole LaLiberte); she’s a lesbian
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Jason says: “NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS doesn’t initially look remarkable; indeed, midway through it, it appears slight of frame but bloated by music videos; interesting, but trying to be two things and doing neither well. But it eventually
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Mark Romanek
Starring: Andrew Garfield | Carey Mulligan | Charlie Rowe | Ella Purnell | Isobel Meikle-Small | Keira Knightley
Jason says: “NEVER LET ME GO is the sort of science fiction that tends to hide its genre or go by another name – ‘speculative fiction’ or ‘slipstream’ – because it wants to associate itself with a different audience. Science
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Dan Eckman
Starring: Aubrey Plaza | D.C. Pierson | Dominic Dierkes | Donald Glover | Matt Walsh
Jason says: “Aw, nuts. Granted, it’s not as if I’m likely to ever actually be able to produce Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators movies, but it’s on my list of things that I would like to do if I
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Rating: 4.75 cats
Director: Werner Herzog
Starring: Brad Dourif | Chloe Sevigny | Grace Zabriskie | Loretta Devine | Michael Peña | Michael Shannon | Willem Dafoe
Jason says: “The first two credits to appear on the screen in MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE are ‘David Lynch Presents’ and ‘A Film By Werner Herzog.’ If you recognize the names, you know that means there’s
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Rating: 1.5 cats
Director: Michael Kallio
Starring: Bart Williams | Bob Young | Colleen Nash | Jack White | Michael East | Pete LaDuke
Jason says: “This shit needs to stop. “Shouldn’t young filmmakers with no money have moved on from spoofing bad 1950s sci-fi by now? It’s too easy a target if the intent is to skewer, and if the goal is to
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Rating: 4.4
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Starring: Bin Won | Hye-ja Kim | Ku Jin | Mi-sun Jun | Sae-Beauk Song | Yoon-jae Moon | Young-suck Lee
Jason says: “Bong Joon-ho’s last film, THE HOST, was a great big special effects extravaganza that set the record for ticket sales in South Korea. In many cases, one would expect a director to try and top that in his
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Glenn Ficarra | John Requa
Starring: Antoni Corone | Brennan Brown | Ewan McGregor | Jim Carrey | Leslie Mann | Rodrigo Santoro
Jason says: “I LOVE YOU PHILLIP MORRIS opens with a playful variant on the standard disclaimer, something along the lines of ‘This all happened. It really did!’ It’s the sort of movie that might get dismissed as ridiculous or improbable
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Rating: 3.25
Director: Gareth Edwards
Starring: Scoot McNairy | Whitney Able
Jason says: “Movies like MONSTERS often get graded on a curve because of how much they do with relatively little. Gareth Edwards shot it guerilla-style and had to cram a fair amount of effects shots into a five or six-figure
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Rating: 2.25
Director: Gianni Di Gregorio
Starring: Gianni Di Gregorgio | Grazia Cesarini Sforza | Maria Cali | Marina Cacciotti | Valeria De Franciscis
Bruce says: “MID-AUGUST LUNCH is based on a solid idea but is hampered by a sloppy, unsatisfying execution. Gianni is a dutiful son confronted with dwindling coffers and an insatiable yearning for white wine. He lives with and cares for
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring: André Dussollier | Dany Boon | Jean-Pierre Marielle | Nicolas Marié | Yolande Moreau
Thom says: “This film is absolute perfection, defining the art of film, frame-by-frame, scene-by-scene, with so many of the delightful excesses that Jeunet is known for. And don’t count me as a Jeunet Pollyanna, by any means. While I’m a
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Rating: 4.2 cats
Director: Jean-François Richet
Starring: Gérard Lanvin | Ludivine Sagnier | Mathieu Amalric | Olivier Gourmet | Samuel Le Bihan | Vincent Cassell
Jason says: “The first half of Jean-François Richet’s two-part biography of French gangster Jacques Mesrine, KILLER INSTINCT, was quitE good; the second half, PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE, is even better: As much as it’s still shuffling a lot of characters
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Jean-François Richet
Starring: Cécile de France | Elena Anaya | Gerard Depardieu | Gilles Lellouche | Roy Dupuis | Vincent Cassel
Jason says: “The story of French outlaw Jacques Mesrine is a grand, sprawling one, so large that Jean-François Richet felt the need to split it into two films in order to do it justice. Watching the first one, covering Mesrine’s
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Claire Denis
Starring: Christopher Lambert | Isaach De Bankolé | Isabelle Huppert | Nicolas Duvauchelle | William Nadylam
Thom says: “With 3 musts-see involved with this project I was really excited about this world premiere. Denis was there for the Q&A but unfortunately Huppert & De Bankolé were not. I had considered Denis one of my TOP 10
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Jeffrey Malmberg
Jason says: “Documentaries about artists and art are frequently disappointing. Filmmakers try their best, but as artists themselves they can make intuitive leaps between their subject and his or her work that is not obvious to a general audience, who
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Deagol Brothers
Starring: Brett Miller | Cody DeVos | Eric Lehning | Leah High
Jason says: “MAKE-OUT WITH VIOLENCE isn’t quite so good as LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, but that’s the film it brings to my mind. Both take horror-movie tropes and twist them into service of a strange story of young love,
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Rating: 1.75
Director: Damien Chazelle
Starring: Anna Chazelle | Desiree Garcia | Eli Gerstenlauer | Jason Palmer | Karen Adelman | Sandha Khin
Jason says: “First impressions can be a heck of a thing to shake. Even before talking to the other people at the screening, I knew there were a lot of things that rookie filmmaker Damien Chazelle did well in GUY
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Alex Craig | Corey Adama
Starring: Anthony Amerdori | James Faulkner | Jeff Halliday | John Mackey | Lukács Bicskeyr | Vanessa Guide
Jason says: “It seems like a ridiculous thing to say, after having seen the movie, but I initially thought MaACHOTAILDROP was a documentary. Skim the description, and the bits about a company with a colorful head recruiting skateboarders looking to
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