Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2 cats
Director: Josh Sternfeld
Starring: Aaron Stanford | Allison Janney | Anthony LaPaglia | Mark Webber
Diane says: “Quel disappointment! This story of a father and two sons five years after the mother’s death is a Sundance sponsored film, written and directed by Josh Sternfeld. My guess is that Sternfeld shot three times as many scenes
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Michael Radford
Starring: Al Pacino | Charlie Cox | Jeremy Irons | Joseph Fiennes | Kris Marshall | Lynn Collins | Zuleikha Robinson
Hilary says: “Another triumph of art direction over substance; yawn. “Further proof of how the mighty have fallen: it was particularly depressing watching Al Pacino chew the scenery and deliver his lines as if he was being fed them one
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Rating: 3.25
Director: Judy Irving
Bruce says: “Mark Bittner arrived in San Francisco a couple of decades ago hoping to make it big in the music business. He wrote his own songs and performed in local watering holes. Somewhere along the line Bittner realized that
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Rating: 4.75 cats
Director: Daniel MacIvor
Starring: Callum Keith Rennie | Ellen Page | James Allodi | Paul Gross | Rebecca Jenkins | Sandra Oh
Bruce says: “WILBY WONDERFUL is similar to an Altman film, having a dozen or so characters whose live are intertwined during the course of about twenty four hours. The film opens abstractly until a boot splashes in what we suddenly
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Mitsuo Yanagimachi
Starring: Hinano Yoshikawa | Meisa Kuroki | Shuuji Kashiwabara | Tetsuji Tamayama
Bruce says: “WHO’S CAMUS ANYWAY?, if it is ever distributed, will surely be famous for its lengthy opening shot which introduces all the many main characters and gives us the lay of the land, the land being the central courtyards
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Amnon Buchbinder
Starring: Aaron Webber | Daniel MacIvor | Rebecca Jenkins
Bruce says: “Emerson (Aaron Webber) is the son of ecology minded parents. His mother Kaya (Rebecca Jenkins) designed their house made of bales of straw and his father is Roger Thorsen (Robert Joy) billed as ‘Saving the World, One Invention
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Juan Pablo Rebella | Pablo Stoll
Starring: Andrés Pazos | Jorge Bolani | Mirella Pascual
Michael says: “Several of us watched Buried Treasure nominee WHISKY the other night, and now that a few days have passed, it has really grown on me. Deadpan humor in the style of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, yet with an
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Atom Egoyan
Starring: Alison Lohman | Colin Firth | Kevin Bacon
Michael says: “It’s always an event for me when my favorite filmmaker, Atom Egoyan, puts out a new film. WHERE THE TRUTH LIES is a period piece and a murder mystery based on a novel by Rupert Holmes. It’s an
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Erwin Wagenhofer
Bruce says: “WE FEED THE FORLD is a call to arms encouraging people to rail against the globalization of agriculture that is destroying the small farming industry. 52% of the world’s gross product is now in the hands of just
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Rating: 4.3 cats
Chris says: “Surprisingly effective documentary about a 1930s woman’s swim team formed at Hakoah, a Jewish sports club in Vienna. Given the place and time, you can guess that the team did not survive into the 1940s. Fortuantely, its members
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Director: Asif Kapadia
Starring: Aino Annuddin | Irfan Khan | Puru Chibber
Tom says: “Well, it’s on Netflix finally, so those of you (every single person in the States, it seems) who missed it in the theater, can catch this fantastic movie. “The title and the way Miramax chose to release this
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Nick Park | Steve Box
Starring: Helen Bonham Carter | Peter Sallis | Ralph Finnes
Chris says: “If you loved the earlier shorts, I can’t imagine you’ll be disappointed by this wonderful, long-awaited feature-length adaptation. It’s true to the spirit of these beloved characters: you get all the expected Rube Goldberg-like contraptions, delightfully bad puns,
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Rating: 3.375
Director: Eytan Fox
Starring: Carola Regnier | Caroline Peters | Ernest Lenart | Gideon Shemer | Hanns Zischler | Knut Berger | Lior Ashkenazi
Hilary says: “Lior Ashkenazi (LATE MARRIAGE) stars in Eytan Fox’s (YOSSI & JAGGER) latest movie as Eyal, an Israeli Mossad assassin, who has been assigned to investigate a Nazi officer at the behest of his boss, Menachem (Gideon Schemer). “Menachem
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Hiner Saleem
Starring: Ivan Franek | Lala Sarkissian | Romik Avinian
Bruce says: “VODKA LEMON is short on plot but long on atmosphere and political statement. In is winter in Armenia and the small village is covered with heavy snow. It is a dry climate, for most of the people sit
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Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Mark Dornford-May
Starring: Andile Tshoni | Lungelwa Blou | Pauline Malefane
Michael says: “There have been many film versions of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen, but U-CARMEN EKHAYELITSHA must certainly be one of the most vivid, enthralling, and satisfying to date. Director Dornford-May first presented this African Carmen on stage with the
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Rating: 4.2 cats
Director: Michael Cuesta
Starring: Annabella Sciorra | Conor Donovan | Jayne Atkinson | Jeremy Renner | Jesse Camancho | Linus Roache | Marcia DeBonis | Zoe Weizenbaum
Chris says: “As I watched Michael Cuesta’s subtly audacious follow-up to L.I.E., I was continually anxious. The film sets up and courts so many potential wrong turns (dubious ones that Todd Solondz would probably gleefully travel down), but then constantly
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Bahman Ghobadi
Starring: Abdol Rahman Karim | Avaz Latif | Soran Ebrahim
Michael says: “I think trailers for foreign films about children with English-language voiceover should be BANNED! TURTLES CAN FLY follows NOBODY KNOWS with a trailer that waxes poetic about nobility, hope, inspiration… in over-sentimentalized, lyrical prose when the truth is,
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Rating: 4.25 cats
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Starring: Banlop Lomnoi | Huai Dessom | Sakda Kaewbuadee
Chris says: “This Thai film begins as a generally straightforward, refreshingly matter-of-fact gay romance between Keng, a soldier, and Tong, a young man from the provinces. This goes on for about an hour, building up a heady sense of erotic
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Rating: 2 cats
Director: Takashi Nakamura
Starring: Akiko Hiramatsu | Megumi Toyoguchi
Michael says: “I’ve been trying to keep up with 2005 films I’ve missed in the theatre by catching them on DVD when they appear. The most recent in this category is a bit of Japanese anime entitled A TREE OF
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Khyentse Norbu
Starring: Lhakpa Dorji | Sonam Lhamo | Tsewang Dandup
Beth C. says: “TRAVELLERS & MAGICIANS uses the popular ‘story-within-a-story’ method to present a character’s moral crisis within the context of other people who have gone through similar struggles. I found this film to be enjoyable and entertaining for the
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