Watching this film is an edifying but frustrating experience; dull in parts, amusing and illuminating in others. You’d still struggle to call it entertainment.
Manderlay (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:95
Fresh:48
Rotten:47
Average Rating:5.6/10
Consensus: Manderlay may work better as a political statement than as a film, making its points at the expense of telling a compelling story.
Runtime: 2 hrs 19 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis: This is the strange, disturbing story of the Manderlay plantation. Manderlay lay on a lonely plain somewhere in the deep south of the USA. It was in the year of 1933 that Grace and her father... This is the strange, disturbing story of the Manderlay plantation. Manderlay lay on a lonely plain somewhere in the deep south of the USA. It was in the year of 1933 that Grace and her father had left the township of Dogville behind them. Grace's father and his army of villains had spent the entire winter seeking out new hunting grounds in vain, and now they were heading south in one last attempt to find a favourable location in which to take up residence. By chance their cars stop in the state of Alabama in front of a large iron gate bearing a thick chain and a padlock. Beside the gate, a dead oak tree towers over a heavy boulder with Manderlay hewn in monumental letters into the granite. Just as Grace, her father and his men are about to leave after a short break and a quick lunch, a young black woman runs up to the car. She knocks on Grace's window. She hammers at the glass in despair. Ignoring her father’s advice to leave others to their own affairs, Grace follows the girl through the gates of Manderlay and there, she finds a group of people living as if slavery had not been abolished seventy years earlier, with white masters and black slaves... Grace believes that she has a duty to make it up to the slaves for injustices they have suffered at the hands of her kind: 'we brought them here, we abused them and made them what they are', as she argues to her father; and she decides that having liberated Manderlay, she will remain at the plantation until she has seen them through their first harvest. Her father grudgingly leaves her with four henchmen and a lawyer, warning Grace that he won't be there to pick up the pieces when her plans for the resurrection of Manderlay fall apart... --© IFC Films [More]
Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach de Bankolé, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe
Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach de Bankolé, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe, Michael Abiteboul, Lauren Bacall, Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier, John Hurt, Chloe Sevigny
Director: Lars von Trier
Director: Lars von Trier
Screenwriter: Lars von Trier
Producer: Vibeke Windelov
Studio: IFC Films
Reviews for Manderlay
A slow-burning, deeply disturbing fable that needs to be seen and discussed
The audience's familiarity with the stylistic devices of Manderlay should allow the film's more reflective screenplay to shine through.
There's a troubling sense that von Trier is simply going through the motions.
Manderlay isn't as powerful or as intense as Dogville, but it is still an intriguing and entertaining film, thanks to Bryce Dallas Howard's performance and John Hurt's hugely enjoyable narration.
It lacks the thrillingly nuts, outlandish quality of the original, but is also quite a bit more pointed and focused.
... an absurdist comedy with a deadpan delivery and run through with the very hypocrisy that von Trier mercilessly ridicules.
Picks at the painful sores of America's racial legacy while withholding the brotherhood-of-man epiphanies that made the Oscar-validated 'Crash' a healing experience for many moviegoers...
It can become tiresome to watch von Trier bash the United States while realizing that he doesn't have a full understanding of what he's attacking.
If you liked "Dogville," you won't want to miss this Danish Cake of minimalism.
A morally provocative meditation on race in America and the troubles that can come when democracy and freedom are crammed down the throats of others.
Rude, smarmy and sickly hilarious, Manderlay has a little something to offend everyone... and I wouldn't have it any other way.
tastes like cough syrup; we may not like what we see but we really need to see it
The most self-important, heavy-handed film since...well, since DOGVILLE.
Latest News for Manderlay
January 26, 2006:
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