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MOVIES / ON DVD / MANDERLAY
Manderlay

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Manderlay (2006)

49%
32%
75%
N/A
N/A
N/A
49 %
Reviews Counted: 93 Fresh: 46  Rotten:47 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. Manderlay may work better as a political statement than as a film, making its points at the expense of telling a compelling story. more
 
Runtime: 2 hrs 19 mins
Theatrical Release: Jan 27, 2006 Limited
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 had left the township of Dogville behind them. Grace's father and his army of villains had spent the... [More]
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 [Less]

Genre: Dramas

Starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Isaach de Bankolé, Danny Glover, Willem Dafoe, Michael Abiteboul

Director: Lars von Trier
Screenwriter: Lars von Trier
Producer: Vibeke Windelov

DVD Info

Release:

Aug 8, 2006

[DVD Details]

Buy It On DVD

Reviews

 
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Ratings Image

If this trilogy finishes up strong, this middle portion may come to be seen as the weakest, though it's still forceful and intimate in the von Trier manner.

Full Review | Comment
09/27/07 05:39 PM
Rob Gonsalves
eFilmCritic.com
Ratings Image

[It] raises interesting questions about what can happen in a democracy when its people are deeply corrupt. ... But likely to be more disheartened than enlightened.

Full Review | Comment
09/12/07 02:37 PM
Jeffrey Overstreet
Looking Closer
Ratings Image

this Great Dane backs up his satiric bark with a vicious bite.

Full Review | Comment
08/02/07 06:55 AM
Anton Bitel
Eye for Film
Ratings Image

A slightly more ponderous - if less dramatically satisfying - example of a Von Trier puppet show.

Full Review | Comment
07/03/07 04:16 AM
Rob Humanick
Projection Booth
Ratings Image

Relying on a daring script as executed by A-list actors, offers a potentially transformational experience for any inclined to contemplate an introspective, gut-wrenching meditation on the intractability of the legacy of slavery.

Full Review | Comment
05/20/07 08:20 PM
Kam Williams
DallasBlack.com
Ratings Image

Manderlay is shorter but just as dull, pretentious and condescending as Dogville.

Full Review | Comment
03/01/07 03:55 AM
Maria Garcia
Film Journal International
N/R

Click to read the article

Full Review | Comment
01/20/07 08:09 AM
Philip French
Observer [UK]
Ratings Image

Manderlay loses in power what it lacks in novelty, even though it's more relevant than anything the year is likely to bring.

Full Review | Comment
11/27/06 03:38 PM
Scott Tobias
Onion AV Club
Ratings Image

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 | Comment
11/24/06 10:18 PM
Urban Cinefile Critics
Urban Cinefile
Ratings Image

The audience's familiarity with the stylistic devices of Manderlay should allow the film's more reflective screenplay to shine through.

Full Review | Comment
09/28/06 03:16 AM
Ryan Gilbey
Sight and Sound
Ratings Image

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

Full Review | Comment
08/24/06 08:06 AM
Dennis Schwartz
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Ratings Image

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 | Comment
06/24/06 04:29 AM
Dave Calhoun
Time Out
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Dig that freaky symbolism!

Full Review | Comment
05/12/06 03:16 AM
David Edelstein
New York Magazine
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Unstintingly raw and cynical.

Full Review | Comment
04/01/06 04:30 AM
David Parkinson
Empire Magazine
Ratings Image

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 | Comment
03/31/06 12:26 PM
John Beifuss
Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Ratings Image

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 | Comment
03/24/06 03:50 PM
Terry Lawson
Detroit Free Press
Top Critic Icon Top Critic
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Manderlay is a misfire, but a misfire from von Trier is still more interesting than a blandly successful Hollywood product.

Full Review | Comment
03/24/06 02:17 PM
Marc Mohan
Oregonian
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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 | Comment
03/24/06 01:06 PM
Leo Goldsmith
Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Ratings Image

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 | Comment
03/17/06 06:19 PM
Jack Garner
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
Ratings Image

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

Full Review | Comment
03/16/06 08:01 PM
Josh Bell
Las Vegas Weekly
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