Film

Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in New York, plus articles, trailers and more

 

The Unforeseen (2007)

Director: Laura Dunn

Critics' rating

Average user rating
No reviews

Movie review

From Time Out New York

Visually rich, narratively ambitious social-problem docs are as uncommon as point-and-shoot nonfiction harangues (and the ills they chronicle) are abundant, so Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen is a rare gift. Plainspoken yet urgent, it makes the wrist-slashingly depressing topic of real-estate development somehow transcendent.

This is partly the influence of executive producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford (the latter of whom appears a little too extensively on camera), which in one sense makes the film a fascinating, unexpected collaboration between two Indiewood warhorses. But it’s Dunn who finds languid lyricism in the central theme of humanity’s (or Texans’, anyway) exploitation of nature. She does so largely by approaching the issue at hand—the parceling of an Austin suburban enclave and its potential for wholesale land-rape—obliquely and with an eye toward the cosmic. One memorable scene, in which a surly, development-friendly legislator assembles a model bomber plane as he’s being interviewed, tells us more about “the deserted prospect of the modern mind” (to quote the Wendell Berry poem that gives the film its title) than a thousand well-meaning lectures from Al Gore. Committed and life-affirming without being naive or strident, The Unforeseen is the movie An Inconvenient Truth wanted to be.

Author: Mark Holcomb

Time Out New York Issue 648: February 28–March 6, 2008


  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields


Cast & crew

Director: Laura Dunn

With: Gary Bradley, Robert Redford

Rated: NR

Duration: 93 mins

US Release: Feb 29 2008




Features

Bridesmaid revisited

Bridesmaid revisited

Anne Hathaway crashes more than a wedding in Rachel Getting Married.

Old-school house

Old-school house

Even in the age of the multiplex, a few old movie theaters continue to thrive in NYC.

Keeping the faith

Hope abounds in Spike Lee’s latest—as it does in the director himself.

Going the distance

TONY toughs out the Toronto International Film Festival, blow by blow.

Race you to the top

Tyler Perry doesn’t need critics—and may not need new audiences.

Spanish intuition

Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall flirt away an Iberian summer in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

To air is human

Man on Wire, a new doc about a surreal Manhattan morning, aims high.