Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: Lee Tamahori
Starring: Dominic Cooper | Khalid Laith | Ludivine Sagnier | Mimoun Oaïssa | Philip Quast | Raad Rawi
Jason says: “You’d be forgiven for thinking that a movie taking place amid the inner circle of Saddam Hussein’s family over the past twenty-five years, and featuring the potential plot twists and mind-benders of look-alikes, would be something fairly exciting.
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Jee-woon Kim
Starring: Byung-hun Lee | Gook-hwan Jeon | Ho-jin Jeon | Min-sik Choi | San-ha Oh | Yoon-seo Kim
Jason says: “A colleague of mine described Kim Ji-woon’s last film, THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD, as an attempt to make an action movie with nothing but the Good Parts. Kim brings that same attitude to I SAW THE
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Hark Tsui
Starring: Andy Lau | Bingbing Li | Carina Lau | Chao Deng | Tony Leung Ka-fai
Jason says: “DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME hits a lot of my sweet spots – it can be described as a Chinese martial-arts take on Sherlock Holmes, with a blockbuster budget, Tsui Hark directing with abandon,
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Alexander Payne
Starring: Amara Miller | BeauBridges | George Clooney | Nick Krause | Shailene Woodley
Jason says: “THE DESCENDANTS is, I suppose, a movie about trust and responsibility, although I’m not getting very far trying to boil it down to parallel situations and easy lessons. That’s okay, though; this lets director Alexander Payne put a
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: John Madden
Starring: Ciarán Hinds | Helen Mirren | Jessica Chastain | Marton Csokas | Sam Worthington | Tom Wilkinson
Jason says: “Attach enough talent to a movie, and more often than not, you’ll at least wind up with something worth watching, and THE DEBT has a fair number of good people working on it. Does it translate into a
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Travis Betz
Starring: Dustin Fasching | Rose McKinnon | Sarah Lassez
Jason says: “Films like Travis Betz’s THE DEAD INSIDE are some of my favorites to write about. Not so much the genre – although, let’s face it, you don’t pass up a chance to write up singing zombies – but
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Howard J. Ford | Jonathan Ford
Starring: David Dontoh | Prince David Oseia | Rob Freeman
Jason says: “Most people who decide to make a zombie movie do it in a bare-bones way, shooting in their hometown rather than going particularly far afield; when you’re working with no budget, it’s best to be in familiar territory.
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Michael Fassbender | Viggo Mortenson | Vincent Cassel
Toni says: “I am not a person that either loves or hates Cronenberg but I am less into perverse stuff and more into his thrillers or more dialogue driven pieces with solid visuals and sound. I accidentally ended up seeing
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Evan Kelly
Starring: Mary-Colin Chisholm | Matthew Amyotte | Nigel Bennett | Stephen Chambers
Jason says: “In most horror movies, insanity encroaches slowly, chipping away at the seemingly normal world that the filmmakers had built up at the start. To say that director Evan Kelly and writer Josh MacDonald go the opposite route with
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Robert Redford
Starring: Evan Rachel Wood | James McAvoy | Justin Long | Kevin Kline | Robin Wright | Tom Wilkinson
Thom says: “Two must-see actors, a passing interest in Redford films (his QUIZ SHOW was my #1 film of 1974!), & the noteworthy cast drove me to a theatre to see this & I’m glad I did. Certainly while I
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Rodman Flender
Julie says: “I went into this with great trepidation. I was not sure how exciting it would be to watch a film about Conan Obrien touring since I always felt the Conan show was just okay…But I was curious to
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Shion Sono
Starring: Asuka Kurosawa | Denden | Hikari Kajiwara | Megumi Kagurazaka | Mitsuru Fukikoshi
Jason says: “Clearly, Sion Sono is a guy I’m going to have to pay more attention to going forward. So far, I’ve seen three of his movies and really liked all three, even though they’re frequently the very definition of
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Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Aaron Katz
Starring: Brendan McFadden | Chris Lankenau | Jeb Pearson | Raúl Castillo | Trieste Kelly Dunn
Jason says: “COLD WEATHER looks like a detective story, but to an extent that’s just camouflage. Though it’s got more of a definite plot than many of the movies that rightly or wrongly are placed under the ‘mumblecore’ umbrella, the
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Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Ian Cheney
Jason says: “Every few weeks, Space.com will mention a meteor shower or comet, and I’ll stay up late and eagerly make my way out to my back porch before remembering that I live right across the river from Boston, and
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Chuan Lu
Starring: Hideo Nakaizumi | Ye Liu | Yuanyuan Gao
Toni says: “We drove up to Boston on a Friday night from RI in traffic to see the one week only CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH up at the Kendall. “Maybe it is the use of black and white to
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Rating: 4.9
Director: Álex de la Iglesia
Starring: Alejandro Tejerías | Antonio de la Torre | Carlos Areces | Carolina Bang | Manuel Tallafé
Jason says: “Alex de la Iglesia’s new movie certainly qualifies as a circus – it’s filled with bright colors and daring displays that look joyful while also tempting the audience with sex and violence. This makes perfect sense; De la
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Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Maryam Keshavarz
Starring: Nasrin Pakkho | Nikohl Boosheri | Reza Sixo Safai | Sarah Kazemy | Sina Amedson | Soheil Parsa
Jason says: “CIRCUMSTANCE is sneaky. It starts out as a simple tale of teenage idealism and perhaps forbidden love, and that thread certainly continues throughout the entire film. The clever thing that writer/director Maryam Keshavarz does is to show a
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Trent Haaga
Starring: Billy Bakshi | Chad Ferrin | Tanisha Mukerji | Timothy Muskatell
Chris says: “Earlier in this festival, I saw a film described as a black comedy that played pretty well as a straight thriller. This one, meanwhile, is presented as a revenge thriller, but winds up being presented so broadly that
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Starring: Agathe Natanson | Gianna Giachertti | Jean-Claude Carrière | Juliette Binoche | William Shimell
Ibad says: “Celebrated Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami marks a new chapter in his long career with CERTIFIED COPY, making a film outside of his home country for the first time. The naturally sunny Tuscan cinematography keeps the film floating light
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Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Werner Herzog
Jason says: “Pundits declaiming the use of 3D in recent years often act like it was gone for a generation between the mid-eighties and late-naughts, but that’s not really the case; it was used extensively for documentaries that played at
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