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Movies / On DVD / Manderlay
Manderlay

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Manderlay (2006)

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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

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Reviews for Manderlay

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21 - 40 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
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I was intrigued by the intensity and audaciousness of Dogville, but Manderlay feels stagey, earnest, long and pretentious. Its grainy, shaky hand-held camera-work only adds to the monotony.

Full Review Source: Urban Cinefile | comment Comment
11/24/06
Urban Cinefile Critics
Urban Cinefile Critics
Urban Cinefile

... an anti-American rant that tediously plays out as a misplaced lecture by the pretentious filmmaker.

Full Review Source: Ozus' World Movie Reviews | comment Comment
08/24/06
Dennis Schwartz
Dennis Schwartz
Ozus' World Movie Reviews

Dig that freaky symbolism!

Full Review Source: New York Magazine | comment Comment
05/12/06
David Edelstein
David Edelstein
New York Magazine

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...

Full Review Source: Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) | comment Comment
03/31/06
John Beifuss
John Beifuss
Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

If von Trier can't be bothered to get out more, he should at least consider picking up a book or just using some real imagination.

Full Review Source: Detroit Free Press | comment 1 Comment
03/24/06
Terry Lawson
Terry Lawson
Detroit Free Press

Manderlay is a misfire, but a misfire from von Trier is still more interesting than a blandly successful Hollywood product.

Full Review Source: Oregonian | comment Comment
03/24/06
Marc Mohan
Marc Mohan
Oregonian

The unusual von Trier film whose formalism is worn lightly, whose performances impress without wearing on the nerves, and whose ethical standpoint is plain for all to observe

Full Review Source: Not Coming to a Theater Near You | comment Comment
03/24/06
Leo Goldsmith
Leo Goldsmith
Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Von Trier takes minimalism to its most minimalist extreme. The format was intriguing in its originality in Dogville. I'm already tired of it.

Full Review Source: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle | comment Comment
03/17/06
Jack Garner
Jack Garner
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Shows that [von Trier's] ideological bullying has run its course.

Full Review Source: Las Vegas Weekly | comment Comment
03/16/06
Josh Bell
Josh Bell
Las Vegas Weekly

Shocking usage of racial epithets and images of 20th-century slavery do their part to mess with your head. Von Trier is an intelligent and capable filmmaker, and he presents some fascinating thoughts and questions in his bitter, accusatory satire. Problem

Full Review Source: Arizona Daily Star | comment Comment
03/16/06
Phil Villarreal
Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star

A film with plenty of interesting things to say but an exhausting way of saying them.

Full Review Source: RTE Interactive (Dublin, Ireland) | comment Comment
03/15/06
Harry Guerin
Harry Guerin
RTE Interactive (Dublin, Ireland)

Rude, smarmy and sickly hilarious, Manderlay has a little something to offend everyone... and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Full Review Source: Philadelphia Weekly | comment Comment
03/14/06
Sean Burns
Sean Burns
Philadelphia Weekly

This already controversial drama is yet another anti-American screed from Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, who's become more than a little tiresome with all his cinematic bashing of the United States and its political policies.

Full Review Source: Deseret News, Salt Lake City | comment Comment
03/03/06
Jeff Vice
Jeff Vice
Deseret News, Salt Lake City

The [plot] degenerates as quickly as von Trier's crude allegory of U.S. foreign policy ... and the pretentiously vacuous Our Town-like staging.

Full Review Source: Salt Lake Tribune | comment Comment
03/03/06
Sean Means
Sean Means
Salt Lake Tribune

There are any number of ways to read Manderlay...

Full Review Source: Los Angeles CityBeat | comment Comment
02/27/06
Andy Klein
Andy Klein
Los Angeles CityBeat
N/R

Click to read the article

Full Review Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch | comment Comment
02/25/06
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Manderlay is both more coherent and more obvious than Dogville, which lacked the clean narrative drive of the new film.

Full Review Source: Seattle Times | comment Comment
02/24/06
John Hartl
John Hartl
Seattle Times

Manderlay comes off as little more than a droning, embittered curiosity.

Full Review Source: Denver Rocky Mountain News | comment Comment
02/24/06
Robert Denerstein
Robert Denerstein
Denver Rocky Mountain News

... an absurdist comedy with a deadpan delivery and run through with the very hypocrisy that von Trier mercilessly ridicules.

Full Review Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer | comment Comment
02/23/06
Sean Axmaker
Sean Axmaker
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Whereas Dogville was a slippery, challenging and ultimately brutal masterpiece, Manderlay is looser, messier, less serious and ultimately far less effective.

Full Review Source: White Plains Times | comment Comment
02/22/06
Bryant Frazer
Bryant Frazer
White Plains Times
 
 
21 - 40 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Text View | |< << 1 2 3 4 5 6 >> >|
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