Earnest but soggy melodrama that preaches to the converted.
In My Country (2005)
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Reviews Counted:80
Fresh:18
Rotten:62
Average Rating:4.8/10
Consensus: A well-intentioned but melodramatic look at post-Apartheid South Africa.
Runtime: 1 hr 44 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) is a Washington Post journalist. His editor provocatively sends him to South Africa to cover the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, in which the... Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) is a Washington Post journalist. His editor provocatively sends him to South Africa to cover the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, in which the perpetrators of murder and torture on both sides during the Apartheid era are invited to come forward and confront their victims. By telling the unvarnished truth and expressing contrition, they may be granted amnesty. Can the deep wounds of Apartheid be healed through reconciliation? Langston is deeply sceptical. He tracks down Col. De Jager, the most notorious torturer in the SA Police and tries to penetrate the mind of a monster, an experience that obliges him to confront his own demons. Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche), is an Afrikaans poet who is covering the hearings for radio. As a white South African she is shattered by the accounts of the cruelty and depravity committed by her fellow countrymen. Anna and Langston must both question their sense of identity. Where do they each belong? How responsible are they for what is done in the name of their respective countries? The moving testimony of the victims affects them deeply. In different ways they are both estranged from their families, and their shared experience draws them ever closer to each other. It is a story charting the unfathomable depths of human cruelty and the redeeming power of forgiveness and love. -- © Sony Pictures Classics [More]
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Samuel L. Jackson, Brendan Gleeson, Menzi "Ngubs" Ngubane
Starring: Juliette Binoche, Samuel L. Jackson, Brendan Gleeson, Menzi "Ngubs" Ngubane
Director: John Boorman
Director: John Boorman
Screenwriter: Ann Peacock
Producer: Robert Chartoff, Mike Medavoy, Kieran Corrigan
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Reviews for In My Country
A wasted opportunity to tell in filmic terms two important histories: the crimes of apartheid and the love with which they were answered.
Because Ann Peacock's pedestrian script couldn't make any movie come to life, our interest in these two characters is nil.
Unfortunately more didactic than dramatic, and although surprises emerge right up to the end, there's precious little suspense, mystery or uncertainty.
The script...intelligently explores...the profound need to make sense out of madness and to find emotional peace in its aftermath...Sustains a deep and moving involvement.
Peace, love, and understanding, apparently, are best served with a side order of .45-caliber satisfaction.
John Boorman's high-minded but hopelessly wooden film makes the fatal mistake of turning characters into mouthpieces.
Stagy, declamatory and vulgarized by a need to hype inherently dramatic material, In My Country is, like so many movies about the Third World made for Western audiences.
Boorman treats this moving, important subject with restraint, tact, and candid views of horrors suffered by the nation.
There is no historical moment so epochal that it cannot be reduced to schlock entertainment in the right hands.
In My Country accomplishes its goal -- but does so largely through obvious plot devices.
A convoluted plot that takes away from the film's important central message
the kind of well-intentioned, but wholly unsuccessful, misfire that makes one desperately pine for a thorough documentary on its real-life subject
Just when you thought Hotel Rwanda had rendered obsolete the sort of neocolonial uplift that investigates black trauma through a white person's eyes, along comes In My Country.
Boorman's bathetic tourism is unconscionable for a subject of this magnitude.
The combo of cultural cringe and a schematic, didactic screenplay strangles the human emotion.
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