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MORVERN CALLAR
"Ramsay reaches out boldly with a film that
is as unsettling as it is minimalist...Ramsay's portrait of Morvern
has an admirable spareness and tension as one sequence connects
to the next, tautly but with the randomness of Morvern's new existence.
The film is almost entirely a visual experience, and the images
of cinematographer Alwin Kuchler (who also shot "Ratcatcher") are
as beautiful and expressive as [Samantha] Morton's Morvern is herself...
No question about it: 'Morvern Callar' confirms Lynne Ramsay as
an important, original talent in international cinema." --Kevin
Thomas, The Los Angeles Times
"...a work of astonishing delicacy and force, a tone poem about
the Frankenstein jolts that all of us, at one time or another, have
to live through... It has no formal dramatic structure whatsoever,
and yet what's there is so wholly felt that it seems almost classical--a
sustained fugue that catches us up gently and carries us to a place
we never would have expected... 'Morvern Callar' begins with the
aftermath of a suicide, but it's about life and life only. This
is a film that breathes." --Stephanie
Zacharek,Salon
"Steeped in the candy-colored anomie that prompted Ramsay to describe
her source as 'Camus for teenagers,' the film is far more fashionably
fluid and dreamily disjunctive than the filmmaker's highly regarded
debut, the kitchen-sink childhood gothic 'Ratcatcher' (1999)...Although
Ramsay would like to establish Morvern as something beyond a mindless
rave chick, the movie is more engrossing than convincing...Like
its protagonist, the movie is indifferent to everything but physical
sensation." --J. Hoberman,
The Village Voice
"'Morvern Callar' is a film easy to admire, but difficult to like.
The title character is a cipher who does terrible things; the directorial
style, though stunning, verges on pretentiousness; and the story
really isn't about much. Yet there's something unshakeable about
its portrait of a woman trying to recover from tragedy and change
her life. And there's the chance to watch Samantha Morton in yet
another uncanny performance...It's the most completely inhabited
performance since Emily Watson's in 'Breaking the Waves'...While
we may never understand Morvern completely, Ramsay's images offer
more than a thousand words to point us in the right direction."
--Rod Armstrong, Reel.com
"It is just as dark as [Ramsay's] 'Ratcatcher'--and even more impressive.
Samantha Morton gives the finest performance of her career as Morvern
Callar, a 21-year-old supermarket nobody in a small Scottish port
who, just in time for Christmas, discovers her live-in boyfriend's
body on the kitchen floor, not far from the brightly lit Yule tree...Morton
deserves an Oscar nomination, but she is unlikely to get one. The
movie is too dark and out of the mainstream to impress the conservative
fogies who vote for the prizes." --V.A.
Musetto, The New York Post
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