Even if the director eventually hard-pedals her pantheist imagery into cliché, this inconvenient truth is discreet, intimate and regularly surprising.
Comment
05/02/08
The Unforeseen (2007)
88
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:32
Fresh:28
Rotten:4
Average Rating:7.3/10
Consensus: A calm documentary that doesn't resort to shrill polemics, The Unforeseen also benefits from great interview subjects and jaw-dropping cinematography.
Runtime: 1 hr 34 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Synopsis: Laura Dunn's feature-length directorial debut is a profoundly stirring, visually stunning, and emotionally overpowering work of epic beauty. Sharing a kinship with the film's executive producer,... [More]
Starring: Robert Redford, Willie Nelson, Ann Richards, Wendell Berry
Director: Laura Dunne
Reviews for The Unforeseen
Top CriticIf The Unforeseen has a fault, it would be a slight lack of focus. A flawed, but beautiful documentary.
07/30/09
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04/23/09
Powerful study of a landmark struggle between environmentalists and real estate developer in Austin, Texas in the early 90s. A parable for our exhausted, consumerist society that is choking itself to death.
01/23/09
The result is an expansive and ambivalent testament to human ingenuity, human intransigence, and nature’s endangered yet enduring power to move.
10/18/08
A thought-provoking documentary that's both informative and strangely poignant--as well as beautifully shot and edited.
06/20/08
By turns rapturously beautiful and unspeakably sad while considering the consequences of unchecked urban sprawl.
06/06/08
Plainspoken yet urgent, it makes the wrist-slashingly depressing topic of real-estate development somehow transcendent.
05/02/08
Laura Dunn captures the national ecological battle in microcosm...
04/03/08
No one who sees this intriguing documentary will want to argue with reporter Greider when he forcefully insists, "We need a more mature regard for the future." We do indeed.
03/14/08
Top Critic[Cinematographer] Daniel has never shot a film for Malick, though you'd hardly guess so, given The Unforeseen's poetic and dreamy shots of nature that, like the images that open the Malick's "The Thin Red Line," hint at an Earthly paradise.
03/14/08
This one purports to be different by including interviews with the evil, rich developers, but the film is very subtly slanted away from them.
03/13/08
The Unforeseen is a poetic and high-minded meditation on American developers’ manifest destiny and the cancer it introduces into the natural world.
03/10/08
As frustrating as it is welcome.
03/07/08
Helmer [Laura] Dunn, though her heart is on her sleeve, gives an even-handed view of things from both sides.
03/07/08
An unusually poetic and meditative eco-themed documentary, Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen is as beautiful as it is ultimately depressing.
03/05/08
Top CriticWhat do Willie Nelson and one of the world's biggest environmental killers have in common? Austin Texas! A very local perspective on the corporate war on the environment
03/04/08
Though fittingly directed by Laura Dunn, one can't help but feel the presence of producer Terrence Malick.
03/01/08
[Director Laura] Dunn's elegant, full-length debut presents a frightening and powerful argument against the kind of reckless, profit-driven land development that not only threatens natural resources, but life itself.
02/29/08
The Unforeseen explores the rights of man, the death of nature, the water below, the air above and all that going, going, gone green in between.
02/29/08
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