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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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41 - 60 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Text View | |< << 1 2 3 4 5 6 >> >|
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[Von Trier] ratchets up the anti-American sentiment significantly here, but it's all hot air with very little substance, even more so than its predecessor.

Full Review Source: Denton Record Chronicle (TX) | comment Comment
02/21/06
Todd Jorgenson
Todd Jorgenson
Denton Record Chronicle (TX)

It's a movie with more surprising things to say than most about racism past and present.

Full Review Source: Chicago Tribune | comment Comment
02/17/06
Michael Wilmington
Michael Wilmington
Chicago Tribune

The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.

Full Review Source: Boston Globe | comment Comment
02/17/06
Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris
Boston Globe

Von Trier doesn't seem as clear on the message he wants to convey in Manderlay, even though he says it as loud as he can.

Full Review Source: TheMovieChicks.com | comment Comment
02/17/06
Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone
Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone
TheMovieChicks.com

Von Trier ... has delivered something so woefully misguided that he's flirting with something a gleeful, provocative filmmaker most fears: irrelevance.

Full Review Source: Sun Publications (Chicago, IL) | comment Comment
02/17/06
Josh Larsen
Josh Larsen
Sun Publications (Chicago, IL)

Another spare, tiresome, pretentious yet simple-minded anti-American diatribe from Danish Dogma-tist Lars von Trier...stale, arid polemic.

Full Review Source: One Guy's Opinion | comment Comment
02/17/06
Frank Swietek
Frank Swietek
One Guy's Opinion

It lacks the thrillingly nuts, outlandish quality of the original, but is also quite a bit more pointed and focused.

Full Review Source: Combustible Celluloid | comment Comment
02/16/06
Jeffrey M. Anderson
Jeffrey M. Anderson
Combustible Celluloid

Even the basic look of the film -- it was filmed on a stage with every shot set against a bleak, dark backdrop -- underscores the filmmaker's position as master manipulator, in a laboratory, looking down at his mice running through his maze.

Full Review Source: Washington Post | comment Comment
02/16/06
Philip Kennicott
Philip Kennicott
Washington Post

Some will see Manderlay as thought-provoking and representative of the way the rest of the world sees us. If that's the case, then we're really in trouble.

Full Review Source: Dallas Morning News | comment Comment
02/16/06
Charles Ealy
Charles Ealy
Dallas Morning News

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
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Von Trier may not be completely right, but he certainly isn't all wrong.

Full Review Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution | comment Comment
02/16/06
Bob Longino
Bob Longino
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

This is not Lars von Trier at his best.

Full Review Source: Reeling Reviews | comment Comment
02/15/06
Robin Clifford
Robin Clifford
Reeling Reviews

It is without exaggeration one of the most blindingly boring films I've seen in years.

Full Review Source: San Francisco Chronicle | comment Comment
02/10/06
Mick LaSalle
Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle

strong enough to interest those who appreciated Dogville, but only just...had more inherent drama in the news reports of John Reilly's cast defection in protest to von Trier's mule killing

Full Review Source: Reeling Reviews | comment Comment
02/05/06
Laura Clifford
Laura Clifford
Reeling Reviews

This is clearly an allegory of the War in Iraq, pining for the days of Saddam, or maybe even Hitler, is what seems to be going on here.

Full Review Source: Greenwich Village Gazette | comment Comment
02/03/06
Eric Lurio
Eric Lurio
Greenwich Village Gazette

It's a visually arresting and intermittently compelling parable about racism and self-determinism that's ultimately too arch and pedantic for its own good.

Full Review Source: Reel.com | comment Comment
02/03/06
Timothy Knight
Timothy Knight
Reel.com

Thanks, Lars, for a bad movie we can't just totally dismiss.

Full Review Source: Los Angeles Daily News | comment Comment
02/03/06
Bob Strauss
Bob Strauss
Los Angeles Daily News

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
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

There's nothing derivative about von Trier's telling, style and ultimate effect.

Full Review Source: E! Online | comment Comment
02/03/06
E! Online

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.

Full Review Source: ReelViews | comment Comment
02/03/06
James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli
ReelViews
 
 
41 - 60 (sorted by date; UK critics are listed first)
Text View | |< << 1 2 3 4 5 6 >> >|
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