Film reviews
Men In Black 3
It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.
Bel Ami
The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.
The Dictator
A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.
The Woman In Black
Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.
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The Whistleblower (Film)
Rating: MA
Running Time: 112
Country: Germany, Canada
Director: Larysa Kondracki
Cast: Monica Bellucci, Vanessa Redgrave, David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz
Distributor: Hopscotch
Release Date: September 29, 2011
Film Worth: $18.00
FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worthExciting new director Larysa Kondracki expertly navigates the personal and political with emotionally devastating results.
In the international film industry, the glass ceiling is fixed and holding strong. While women occupy all kinds of positions on crews and behind the scenes, the top job (or what's seen as the top job, anyway) of directing is still wholly and unequivocally dominated by men. So when a female director comes along, interest is immediately high. When she comes along and belts it out of the park, that interest turns to pulse-pounding excitement. Enter Canadian-born Larysa Kondracki, who helmed the highly regarded short film, Viko, and now makes her feature debut with The Whistleblower, a film so tough, anguished and emotionally devastating that you can safely assume that Kondracki has scratched words like "compromise" and "safe" from her personal vocabulary.
Based on a true story, the film tracks Kathryn Bolkovac (a wonderfully gutsy and full-force turn from Rachel Weisz), a Nebraska cop who takes a well-paying job on a UN peacekeeping tour of war ravaged Bosnia in order to well up a big enough stake so she can set herself up closer to her teenage daughter, who is now in the custody of her father after a bitter divorce. Idealistic and optimistic, Kathryn's eyes are quickly opened to the ugliness that quickly evolves in shattered nations, but the true horrors emerge later, as she discovers that opportunistic private security officers deployed by the US government - as well as UN peacekeepers - have become involved in the kidnapping and trafficking of young women, for both profit and their own repulsive sexual gratification.
Never shying away from the story's essential horrors (but never exploiting them either), The Whistleblower is a literal gut-punch of a film. The wild range of emotions that the film evokes (from white-hot rage to heartbreaking sadness) is stunning, while its aggressively feminist stance (in the aftermath of war, the sick sexual impulses of morally void men are given ample ground to flourish, and are then left to grow largely unchecked because they are too difficult to deal with diplomatically) is refreshing in its boldness and true rarity in today's cinema. Working expertly in both the personal (the plight of one trafficked girl will shred, and not just pull at, your heartstrings) and the political arenas, Larysa Kondracki announces herself as a filmmaker of true grit with The Whistleblower, a movie that really matters, in every sense of the term.
