A sardonic look at suburban sprawl in Calgary. With its wry surrealistic touches, this is a movie that makes you smile while it makes you think. Highly recommended
Comment
01/23/09
Radiant City (2006)
94
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:16
Fresh:15
Rotten:1
Average Rating:6.9/10
Runtime: 1 hr 33 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Director: Gary Burns
Reviews for Radiant City
1 - 16 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
a very well crafted and easy to watch movie
08/01/08
Author James Howard Kunstler says the suburban landscape is "brutal" and "soul-draining," and it's hard to argue when the filmmakers show him sitting in a bike path "rest area," a little bench behind a chain-link fence with a view of the freeway.
07/06/07
Irrefutable evidence that post modern suburbia is an unmitigated disaster which can't deliver on its seductive promise to deliver the good life to refugees from the big city.
06/07/07
[A] sublimely slippery, slightly surreal and not entirely 'just the facts, ma'am' documentary.
06/01/07
The faux-documentary aspect of Radiant City is a huge gamble that doesn't pay off.
05/31/07
Suburban sprawl takes a well-deserved hit in Radiant City, a documentary by Canadian filmmaker Gary Burns and journalist Jim Brown.
05/30/07
Blending documentary elements and some dramatic material, Radiant City is an acerbic position paper on the cultural damage done by postwar architectural fads.
05/30/07
Top Critic[An] enlightening and disturbingly funny critique of North American suburban sprawl.
05/29/07
Radiant City is a movie about communities that offer everything prospective citizens might want or need, save this: a human reason to live there.
03/31/07
It acknowledges the lure of urban sprawl is as every bit as phony yet intoxicating as the tug of cinema itself.
03/30/07
Gary Burns' latest vision of dystopia is an edgy look at exurbia, this time with a documaker's eye.
10/21/06
Top CriticAlthough this National Film Board-produced film is promoted as a documentary, it's really a combination of essay and drama about that favourite bugbear, suburbia.
09/23/06
The pundits bring their considerable expertise to bear on out-of-control development that’s on a reckless course of urban/ suburban destruction.
09/23/06
Radiant City is a fascinating 'thoughtumentary'
09/10/06
...successful as both a documentary on the suburbs and an intimate look at the ups and downs of an admittedly quirky nuclear family.
09/07/06
1 - 16 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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