A beautiful, soulful work about real estate development and sprawl, focused on Austin's beloved Barton Springs, and if you think that's impossible you haven't seen it.
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03/20/07
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The Unforeseen (2007)
88
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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.
Theatrical Release:Feb 29, 2008 Limited
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
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Reviews for The Unforeseen
Top CriticOne of the great documentaries of our time, The Unforeseen is a rapturous nightmare.
02/27/08
a striking debut
02/28/08
If The Unforeseen has a fault, it would be a slight lack of focus. A flawed, but beautiful documentary.
07/30/09
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
Top CriticIt provides a multilayered examination of what it means for society to "develop" and "grow" while depleting its natural resources.
11/14/07
An unusually poetic and meditative eco-themed documentary, Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen is as beautiful as it is ultimately depressing.
03/05/08
A thought-provoking documentary that's both informative and strangely poignant--as well as beautifully shot and edited.
06/20/08
Calling The Unforeseen a documentary somehow feels crass. It's a work of art.
02/29/08
The director makes a convincing case against the extremism of property rights when those rights trample on the needs of the public.
01/31/08
The movie's glacial pace and willingness to let its mind and eye wander that produces its spiritual and intellectual heft—not to mention its atypical visual splendor.
02/27/08
Top CriticBy turns rapturously beautiful and unspeakably sad while considering the consequences of unchecked urban sprawl.
06/06/08
Top CriticEven if the director eventually hard-pedals her pantheist imagery into cliché, this inconvenient truth is discreet, intimate and regularly surprising.
05/02/08
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
[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
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 CriticAdd The Unforeseen to the catalog of artfully produced nonfiction films that show how humans are screwing up the planet.
02/28/08
Top CriticPowerful 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 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
Plainspoken yet urgent, it makes the wrist-slashingly depressing topic of real-estate development somehow transcendent.
05/02/08
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