3 Needles (2006)
Average Rating: 4.9/10
Reviews Counted: 37
Fresh: 13 | Rotten: 24
In getting its message about the AIDS epidemic across, the film unfortunately sacrifices story and character.
Average Rating: 4.7/10
Critic Reviews: 16
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 12
In getting its message about the AIDS epidemic across, the film unfortunately sacrifices story and character.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 2,918
My Rating
Movie Info
Three stories, which offer differing perspectives on the AIDS pandemic, are featured in this anthology-drama. Sister Clara (Chloë Sevigny) is a young nun who is working with two, more experienced, missionaries (Olympia Dukakis and Sandra Oh) in a village along the African coast. Sister Clara finds herself struggling against ignorance and misinformation among the natives, but discovers she can only accomplish so much through traditional means and is forced to make a great personal sacrifice for
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Cast
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Shawn Ashmore
Denny -
Stockard Channing
Olive -
Tanabadee Chokpikultong
Tong Sam -
Olympia Dukakis
Sister Hilde -
Lucy Liu
Jin Ping -
Sandra Oh
Sister Mary John -
Ian Roberts
Hallyday -
Chloë Sevigny
Sister Clara -
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All Critics (38) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (13) | Rotten (25) | DVD (4)
If nothing else, [director Thom] Fitzgerald has demonstrated how huge a challenge the AIDS epidemic is on a worldwide scale, and how it will take a concerted, intelligent effort to solve it. It'll take a lot more than throwing money around.
Top CriticOnly the African story feels complete, while the Chinese story is gloomily hopeless and the Montreal story is just a bad idea. 3 Needles is not about AIDS; it's about the exploitation of it.
Broad in scope and at times visually stunning, [director Thom] Fitzgerald's project is ambitious but lacks cohesion.
It's hard to know what exactly the movie means with a lot of the choices it makes, even if, ultimately, it means well.
Though not as coherent as it might be, 3 Needles, with its stunning cinematography by Thomas M. Harting, is never less than engaging and suggests powerfully the myriad reasons why AIDS, after a quarter of a century, remains so difficult to combat.
Had it taken a more hard-headed approach, 3 Needles might have been to the AIDS epidemic what Traffic was to the drug trade.
As a movie with an important message, 3 Needles is an idiotic waste of time.
great performances and the heartbreaking dilemmas
A marginally involving dramatization of how peopledeal with AIDS in 3 separate cultures
Making serious points about serious issues, the film underscores repeatedly the need for personal and official vigilance concerning "the virus,"
3 Needles is a case of diminishing returns with the first story of blood running in China the best and the last, set in Africa, the least compelling.
Three riveting dramas about the AIDS crisis set in South Africa, China, and Canada that open our eyes and our hearts to victims of this dread disease.
The situations are contrived, the ironies are cheap, and the dialogue is overly blunt.
Demonstrates that the transmission of HIV has become an uncontrollable global pandemic that feeds on poverty and recognizes no sexual, national or religious borders.
3 Needles is difficult to take at times, but it ultimately rewards those viewers willing to meet its challenges.
3 Needles, Thom Fitzgerald's globe-spanning investigation of the effects of AIDS, may ultimately be a call to unity, but there's an extreme amount of despair and misery before we get to hear that trumpet blare.
Nothing is as irritating as watching a film which is little more than an exercise of ego; worse is watching one that is about as discrete in its purpose as a missionary in Africa.
It's gorgeously filmed, but its character logic very rarely makes any sense.
Audience Reviews for 3 Needles
Super Reviewer
I was not fan's of any of these actors or the director, but due to the story subject I was willing to give it a try. The best story was the intial full story ripped from the headlines about AIDS being passed onto innocent Chinese rural citizens. What I was surprised at was that they do not touch on the cover up.
After an initial sad, but very truthful story the movie goes quickly downhill from there. The second story is an idiotic and selfish story, that puts in a twist, but doesn't pay off and only is weird. I felt no sympathy for any of the characters in that second story.
The third story show's the writer and director's total misunderstanding of Catholic theology, nuns, and their views. Then essentially makes a saint out of a Nun who pimps herself out to a rich western business man for the sake of the dying AID's children to make her out as some saint. It ends up being a sad and idiotic moral to a very real crisis in Africa.
This story is not like Babel other than being a losely connected story in various countries. Babel shockingly showed human connection through pain, but this story instead shows nothing of the sort. Instead, it uses a very real crises as a backdrop to some interesting story telling and outright mischaracterization of a faith and promotion of some Unitarian feel good afterschool hogwash.
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[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"The Fortitude of the Buddha" - In southern China, Jin(Lucy Liu), a very pregnant blood smuggler, sets up a blood donation unit in a village to pay locals $5 apiece for their blood. A poor farmer, Tong Sam(Tanabadee Chokpikultong), is too sick to give but he volunteers his 11-year old daughter, Qi(Yotaka Cheukaew), instead.[/font]
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"The Passion of the Christ" - In Montreal, a porn star, Denys(Shawn Ashmore), is faking his HIV blood tests with his invalid father's(Aubert Pallascio) blood. Eventually his ruse is discovered.[/font]
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"The Innocence of the Pagans" - In Africa, three nuns(Olympia Dukakis, Sandra Oh and Chloe Sevigny) arrive not to care for the large amount people suffering from AIDS, but to proselytize.(Thus, explaining why missionaries are some of my least favorite people.)[/font]
[font=Century Gothic][/font]
[font=Century Gothic]"3 Needles" is an ambitious movie that is occasionally powerful and beautiful. Through an understated style with little dialogue, the movie tells three stories that do a good job of showing how AIDS can flourish through self-interest and exploitation but also a way of fighting it with activists united on a global scale. In the end, the people of the world need to communicate better with each other to improve the world we live in.[/font]