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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 5:31:58 GMT
Discussion, reviews, news, pics, etc.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 4, 2017 4:24:20 GMT
This THR review from IMDb is quite brutal. Some quotes: - As the producer, though, Thomas has assembled a top team of craftsmen to make a competent film. But the simplistic and sentimental tale is pitched in strident black-and-white terms that won't carry the day.
- Thomas appears to want to turn this strange story into a modern-day fairy tale. But the literal-mindedness of his filmmaking works against this ambition.
- Bale and Hurt do reasonable jobs of portraying characters that are more symbolic than flesh and blood. But both are forced to play the superficial tics of mental aberration to the hilt since there's precious else to these characters.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 8, 2017 15:01:41 GMT
Stephen Holden's review at New York Times is much kinder than the THR one's: - This contemporary moral fable, dressed up as a heart-in-your-throat psychological thriller, accumulates the lingering force of an especially vivid and terrifying bad dream.
- Modernized with an aggressive animal-rights agenda, the movie poses troubling, unanswerable questions about the relative value of human life in relation to other species and the extremes to which people should go to protect life. In doing so, it flirts with a storybook sentimentality... And in its crowning and disturbing irony, the heroes who bend over backward to avoid harming a mouse or a cockroach, act homicidally.
- ''All the Little Animals,'' ... would seem hokey if it didn't have powerful, extraordinary central performances and cinematography that lends the English landscape around Cornwall a mythical cast. Mr. Bale's Bobby is sympathetic but deeply, scarily troubled, given to desperate tantrums and episodes in which he curls into a ball and becomes a quivering vegetable. Mr. Hurt gives Summers the right mixture of fanaticism, misanthropy and adult dignity. As for Mr. Benzali, with his gleaming pate, twisted little sneer, predatory eyes and wattled chin, dressed in a $2,000 suit and grimacing behind the wheel of a Rolls-Royce: he is a child's worst nightmare.
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