Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.5 cats
Director: Kim Ki-Duk
Starring: Jae Hee | Kwon Hyuk-ho | Lee Seung-yeon
Tom says: “I saw at least 2 dozen films at last years Toronto Film Festival, but the one that stayed with me was the Korean film 3-IRON. “This delicate, quiet yet whimsical movie establishes Kim Ki-Duk’s (SUMMER, SPRING, SOMETHING AND
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Rating: 5 cats
Director: Wong Kar-Wai
Starring: Faye Wong | Gong Li | Tony Leung | Zhang Zhiyi
Thom says: “I was looking forward to seeing this film almost more than any other I knew about. With Wong Kar Wai as director and starring Tony Leung, Li Gong, Ziyi Zhang, Maggie Cheung, & Faye Wong how could it
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Director: Ramadan Suleman
Starring: Mpumi Malatsi | Pamela Nomvete | Sophie Mgcina
Bruce says: “In the 1960’s many South African men went into exile leaving the women to raise the children. Supposedly 80% of South African leaders were brought up by single mothers. The writer and director of ZULU LOVE LETTER were
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Takeshi Kitano
Starring: Beat Takeshi | Gadarukanaru Taka | Michiyo Ookusu | Michiyo Yasuda | Tadanobu Asano
Diane says: “Samurai spaghetti western with a heavy dose of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. While samurai gangs destroy each other, Kitano shows what’s happening to the disenfranchised regular folks. Beat Takeshi, playing the lead role of THE BLIND
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: Alexandra Cassevetes
Hilary says: “Xan (Alexandra) Cassavetes’ first feature-length foray into the ‘family business’ tells the story of Z Channel, the the nation’s first pay-cable station, founded in 1974 in LA. “Z Channel’s founder, Jerry Harvey, was a rabid cinemaphile who influenced
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Rating: 3.5 cats
Director: David Mackenzie
Starring: Emily Mortimer | Ewan MacGregor | Ewan Stewart | Jack McElhone | Pauline Taylor | Peter Mullan | Stuart McQuarrie | Therese Bradley | Tilda Swinton
Chris says: “YOUNG ADAM features Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton having lots of steamy, hot sex in the repressed 1950s. It’s not a skeezy film, nor a really pleasurable one. At least no one pays too dearly for their sins;
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Director: Chris Smith | Dan Ollman | Sarah Price
Chris says: “Hilarious documentary on two satirists-cum-activists who pose as WTO members to educate the public about that organization’s damaging effects on corporate politics, third world ecosystems and beyond. A little more entertaining than provocative, it’s a sly diversion that
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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;
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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.
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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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