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Movies / On DVD / Manderlay
Manderlay

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Manderlay (2006)

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Reviews Counted:8

Fresh:4

Rotten:4

Average Rating:5.5/10

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

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Reviews for Manderlay

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1 - 9 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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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.

Full Review Source: Time Out | comment Comment
06/24/06
Dave Calhoun
Dave Calhoun
Time Out
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Unstintingly raw and cynical.

Full Review Source: Empire Magazine | comment Comment
04/01/06
David Parkinson
David Parkinson
Empire Magazine
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N/R

Click to read the article

Full Review Source: Guardian [UK] | comment Comment
03/04/06
Peter Bradshaw
Peter Bradshaw
Guardian [UK]
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There's a troubling sense that von Trier is simply going through the motions.

Full Review Source: BBC | comment Comment
02/21/06
Matthew Leyland
Matthew Leyland
BBC
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The crucial difference between Manderlay and the almost unbearable Dogville is not that his politics have changed, but that his sense of mercy for the audience has been awakened.

Full Review Source: Chicago Sun-Times | comment Comment
02/16/06
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
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Manderlay is pompously didactic from the first of its 133 long minutes -- a harsh and endlessly schematic morality tale in which diatribe is mistaken for story.

Full Review Source: Los Angeles Times | comment Comment
02/03/06
Josh Kun
Josh Kun
Los Angeles Times
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Set in Alabama in 1933, the movie lays out an excoriating examination of the legacy of slavery in the United States.

Full Review Source: New York Times | comment Comment
01/26/06
Stephen Holden
Stephen Holden
New York Times
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American filmmakers, novelists and artists of all stripes have dealt the perplexing issue of race relations for decades, even centuries. Nothing von Trier presents here, whether real or imagined, is fresh or new.

Full Review Source: Hollywood Reporter | comment Comment
05/18/05
Kirk Honeycutt
Kirk Honeycutt
Hollywood Reporter
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Those eager to lap up what the Dogmatic one has to say will readily do so.

Full Review Source: Variety | comment Comment
05/17/05
Todd McCarthy
Todd McCarthy
Variety
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1 - 9 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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