Teaching audiences to view films actively
By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: James Marsh
Starring: Gael García Bernal | Laura Harring | Pell James | William Hurt
Chris says: “In one of his first (good) English-speaking roles, Gael Garcia Bernal is a young man who has just finished a stint in the US Navy. Named Elvis (hence the film’s ironic title), he rolls into Corpus Christi, Texas,
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Jonathan Dayton | Valerie Faris
Starring: Abigail Breslin | Alan Arkin | Beth Grant | Greg Kinnear | Paul Dano | Steve Carrell | Toni Collette
Beth C. says: “This film did an excellent job by bringing together a broad range of comedic talent. The film was by most standards a formulaic American summer comedy. But, that’s OK! Because as long as the jokes are funny
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Marc Forster
Starring: Dustin Hoffman | Emma Thompson | Maggie Gyllenhaal | Queen Latifah | Will Ferrell
Michael says: “Despite rather major concessions to plot, and the fact that Scot and I came up with better motivations for certain characters to make the plot work better, I found STRANGER THAN FICTION to be a valiant piece of
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Malcolm Ingram
Chris says: “Contrary to what popular television shows like Will and Grace tell us, not all gay people live in hip, urbane neighborhoods. Malcolm Ingram’s documentary counters this stereotype by chronicling two gay bars in backwoods Mississippi. One, Rumors, stands
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Sydney Pollack
Bruce says: “Sydney Pollock is an experienced, award-winning filmmaker. Until SKETCHES OF FRANK GEHRY, all of his films have been feature films, not a single documentary in his portfolio. What made him make this film? Gehry and Pollock have been
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: David Zeiger
Bruce says: “FTA…Fun, Travel Adventure…Foxtrot, Tango Alpha…Fuck The Army. That is the evolution of the initials that were first used as an Army recruiting slogan in the early Vietnam years. As the war escalated and the troops began to see
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Hans-Christian Schmid
Starring: Burghart Klaußner | Imogen Kogge | Sandra Hüller
Bruce says: “Films about illness and disability used to run the risk of being slotted into the ‘Ailment of the Week’ made-for-TV film category. That insult is mostly a thing of the past since television is now many times more
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Carlos Saurin
Starring: Juan Villegas | Rosa Valsecchi | Walter Donado
Bruce says: “EL PERRO (sometimes advertised as BOMBON, EL PERRO) is a delightful film. Set in Patagonia, the story is paper thin but the sentiment is sincere thanks to a lovely performance by Juan Villegas. He plays Coco, an aging
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Richard Eyre
Starring: Bill Nighy | Cate Blanchett | Judi Dench | Juno Temple | Max Lewis | Philip Davis
Michael says: “Richard Eyre follows-up IRIS and STAGE BEAUTY with a real romp of a thriller in NOTES ON A SCANDAL. There’s a lot of excess in SCANDAL, and the entire thing really lives and dies by Judi Dench’s performance
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Rating: 4 cats
Director: Greg Whiteley
Chris says: “Few musicians–heck, few people have undergone as radical a transformation as Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane. In the early ’70s, he was the bassist for the New York Dolls, a thunderously influential (but never commercially successful) cross-dressing glam rock outfit.
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