Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: John Kent Harrison
Starring: Alfre Woodard | Alison Elliot | David Dorfman | Gregory Smith | Kate Nelligan | Katie Stuart
Robert says: “Author Madeleine L’Engle has been compared to titans like Isaac Asimov, both for the sheer volume of her literary output and the wide variety of it. L’Engle’s Newberry Award-winning young adult fantasy novel, A Wrinkle In Time, first
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Rating: 3.25
Director: Zhang Ke Jia
Starring: Alla Shcherbakova | Hongwei Wang | Jue Jing | Taisheng Chen | Yiqun Huang | Zhong-wei Jiang | Zhongwei Jiang
Bruce says: “‘Give us a day, we’ll show you the world,’ is the slogan of The World, a Beijing theme park where replicas of world famous monuments sit side-by-side usually downscaled to give consistency to the overall ambiance of the
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Rating: 3.75 cats
Director: Eric Chaikin | Julian Patrillo
Michael says: “Shades of SPELLBOUND! This doc focused on 4 contenders for the National Scrabble Championship. The film follows the four as the spend a year preparing for the tournament, both exploring their lives and their Scrabble successes and failures.
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Rating: 3.9
Director: Nicole Kassell
Starring: Benjamin Bratt | Eve | Kevin Bacon | Kyra Sedgwick | Mos Def
Bruce says: “The subject of THE WOODSMAN is child abuse. In this emotionally difficult film Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a parolee who has recently exited prison. He is noticing that the world looks a lot younger. That may not be
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Richard Loncraine
Starring: Bernard Hill | Eleanor Bron | James McAvoy | Jon Favreau | Kirsten Dunst | Nikolaj Coster-Waldau | Paul Bettany | Sam Neil
Bruce says: “Being a huge tennis fan, I approached WIMBLEDON with certain trepidation. Would this romantic comedy be as bad as I feared? The answer is ‘no, it wasn’t really bad at all,’ although it should have been much better.
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.25 cats
Bruce says: “**SPOILERS AHEAD** “Wilbur and his brother Harbour live behind the used bookstore which their late father had run for many years. Their mother died when Wilbur was just five. Wilbur was the favorite child of both his parents;
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 3 cats
Director: Theo Angelopoulos
Starring: Alexandra Aidini | Giorgos Armenis | Nikos Poursadinis
Bruce says: “TRILOGY: THE WEEPING MEADOW begins with a group of Greek refugees from Odessa who have fled the Bolshevik revolution and are now approaching Thessalonica where they will ultimately settle in the mud flats along the river. The image
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: John Curran
Starring: Laura Dern | Mark Ruffalo | Naomi Watts | Peter Krause
Beth says: “I missed the first minutes of WE DON’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE which, despite starring Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo and Peter Krause, was horrible. Sooo booooring! It’s about two couples, the women and men each best friends
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Rating: 1.5 cats
Director: Deborah Kampmeier
Starring: Daphne Rubin-Vega | Elisabeth Moss | Robin Wright Penn
Michael says: “I was so intrigued by the premise and the preview of this little American indie, but it turned out to be a disappointing mess. Deborah Kampmeier’s first film follows a young woman, whose family are all born again
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Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Starring: Adrien Brody | Bryce Dallas Howard | Joaquin Phoenix
Rob says: “A purveyor of film-flammery like Michael Moore is, quite rightly, called to task when he presents a story in a lazy and disingenuous manner, and so, too, shall M. Night Shyamalan. The writer/director/producer of the epic fluke THE
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring: Audrey Tautou | Gaspard Ulliel | Jean-Pierre Becker
Howard says: “I found this winning tale of hope quite wonderful. It’s a romantic mystery film about a young woman never giving up even though all signs point to her finance lying dead in the middle of a WWI battlefield.
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.4
Director: Mike Leigh
Starring: Eddie Marsan | Imelda Staunton | Phil Davis | Richard Graham
Bruce says: “When Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) is instructed by a jail matron to take off her wedding ring, she wrinkles her face in pain and says ‘I can’t. It’s never been off in twenty seven years.’ She does manage
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Rating: .75 cats
Director: Mira Nair
Starring: Gabriel Byrne | Geraldine McEwan | James Purefoy | Jonathan Rhys-Meyers | Reese Witherspoon | Rhys Ifans
Diane says: “Yuk. Reese Witherspoon is a bad choice for the lead here–she really can’t carry it. Music is too heavy; scenes surprisingly clichéd; Nair’s liberties with the book to emphasize the India element (e.g., belly-dancing replaces a game of
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Alejandro Agresti
Starring: Carmen Maura | Julieta Cardinali | Rodrigo Noya
Michael says: “This lovely Argentinian film certainly feels like the filmmaker looking back on his childhood (I actually have no absolutely nothing about this filmmaker, so I don’t know if that’s true or not.) Alejandro Agresti has written and directed
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Je-yong Lee
Starring: Do-yeon Jeon | Han-il Na | Hyeon-jae Jo | Mi-suk Lee | So-yeon Lee | Yang-ja Jeon | Yong-jun Bae
Diane says: “I read that this is the 10th iteration of Les liaisons dangereuses to hit the screen. In this very erotic Korean version, set in the 18th century with its sumptuous trappings, director Je-yong Lee uses a subplot of
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Director: Matthew Ryan Hoge
Starring: Chris Kline | Don Cheadle | Jena Malone | Ryan Gosling
Hilary says: “Generally interesting actors Don Cheadle, Ryan Gosling, and Jena Malone are wasted in this boring, heavy-handed tale of a teen who murders his ex-girlfriend’s brother.”
Read the review...By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.2 cats
Director: David Gordon Green
Starring: Dermot Mulroney | Devon Alan | Eddie Rouse | Jamie Bell | Josh Lucas | Kristen Stewart | Patrice Johnson | Robert Longstreet
Bruce says: “**ATTENTION SPOILERS** “UNDERTOW is the latest film from David Gordon Green, director of GEORGE WASHINGTON and ALL THE REAL GIRLS. This is the first film which he did not write himself. Again, Green proves beyond a doubt that
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Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: Jacob Tierney
Starring: Gary Farmer | Joshua Close | Michelle-Barbara Pelletier | Nick Stahl
Bruce says: “TWIST is a film about the hapless lives of teenage Toronto street hustlers. Like other films of this genre – JOHNS, MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO and SUGAR – the bleakness and danger associated with doing drugs, turning tricks
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Yôji Yamada
Starring: Hiroyuki Sanada | Nenji Kobayashi | Rie Miyazawa
Michael says: “I’ve been itching to see this film on DVD ever since Georgette mentioned how much she loved it several weeks ago. I’d never pegged Georgette for a martial arts kind of gal, and as it turns out, TWILIGHT
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Rating: 2 cats
Director: Bruno Dumont
Starring: David Wissak | Yekaterina Golubeva
Bob says: “David is an American photographer from LA. Katia is his girlfriend, and possibly his model. She speaks mostly French, but I get the feeling from her name and her accent that she may be Russian. The two of
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