Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 5 cats
Director: Doug Block
Bruce says: “**Spoilers** “The idea of seeing someone else’s home movies may be appealing if the ‘someone else’ is a good friend, but much less so if the films belong to a stranger. There are exceptions such as TARNATION and
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Michael Apted
Bruce says: “Tony is a kid from the East End, once a rough-and-tumble section of London, now home to many immigrants from Africa and Asia. Jackie, Sue and Lynn hail from similar backgrounds. Simon and Paul were living in a
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Ilya Khrjanovsky
Starring: Marina Vovchenko | Sergei Shnurov | Yuri Laguta
Chris says: “This is one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen (and if you know me, that’s saying something). 4 begins with a piano-tuner, a prostitute, and a slaughterhouse worker. Strangers to each other, they meet in a Moscow
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Ben Hopkins
Bruce says: “Judging the merits of a documentary can be daunting. Has the filmmaker made a focused statement? Does the film develop a mosaic based on a topic or theme? What about the truth – should the filmmaker be bound
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Rating: 3 cats
Director: Thom Fitzgerald
Starring: Chloe Sevigny | Ian Roberts | Lucy Liu | Olympia Dukakis | Sandra Oh | Shawn Ashmore | Stockard Channing
Michael says: “3 NEEDLES is Thom Fitzgerald’s A.I.D.S. epic, spanning three continents, telling three stories, and clearlyva movie that was a labor of love, in addition to clearly being a labor of high finances. In Africa, three nuns double as
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Géla Babluani
Starring: George Babluani | Pascal Bongard | Philippe Passon
Bruce says: “**Spoilers Beyond Second Paragraph** “In spite of garnering prizes at Sundance, the Venice Film Festival and the European Film Awards 13 TAZMETI has remained relatively obscure. Beautifully constructed, acted and filmed 13 TZAMETI is an unusual thriller. Sébastian
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Rating: 3.375
Director: Sally Potter
Starring: Joan Allen | Sam Neill | Shirley Henderson | Simon Akbarian
Michael says: “YES is a challenging and ambitious film. You would expect no less from Sally Potter, the director of ORLANDO and THE TANGO LESSON. It has been a couple of weeks since I saw the film and I still
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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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