Word: docudramas
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Storytellers are of course free to spin fiction from historical fact. But what Greengrass does here, unlike in his scrupulous docudrama about the seizing of United Flight 93 on 9/11, is resolve thorny foreign policy issues from 2003 with 2010 hindsight and the truth-seeking missile of an action-hero superman...
...docudrama-style film begins in 1945 with the then temporarily allied communists and Nationalists celebrating the defeat of the Japanese and culminates with the declaration of the People's Republic by Mao at Beijing's Tiananmen Square. It purports to tell the true and full story of the tangled dance between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the KMT to forge a new, unified China. As you'd expect, many - but surprisingly not all - elements of the KMT are portrayed as malevolent and capricious, and the CCP justly triumphs (of course!). Yet Founding goes beyond routine propaganda. What's striking...
...this docudrama grit allows for precious little dramatic juice. Given that Dillinger's death was the most famous kill in FBI history, there can be no coil of suspense in this story; its ending is as predictable as a Passion play's. The vitality has to come from whatever fresh insights Mann can find in Dillinger's Stations of the Cross. And these are lacking. Few sparks are struck in the love story; Cotillard, last year's Oscar winner for La Vie en Rose, makes a tepid bedmate for the always sexy Depp. Mostly the film displays gangsters doing their...
...relic of that halcyon era of 2008, when the movie was shot. And by emphasizing the cop-killer relationship, the picture loses the original's busy fresco of New Yawk types. Pushing, complaining, invading the space of the movie's stars, they were the graffiti in this subway docudrama...
...Gothic (1986), Richardson somehow made emotional sense of a young woman who is racked by visions of her stillborn child, and who, from the labor of her nightmares, gives birth to literature's most enduring monster: Frankenstein. Two years later, she was convincingly Californian in Paul Schrader's oneiric docudrama about Patty Hearst - another nightmare role that she approached with the passion and, especially, the precision of a mature actress. She was also exemplary as the star of the 1990 film The Handmaid's Tale, from Margaret Atwood's novel (and Harold Pinter's screenplay), in which she plays...