River Queen (2005)
Director: Vincent Ward
Movie review
From Time Out London
A yearning panpipe flutter or an obtrusive slo-mo flashback is never far away in Vincent Ward’s over-egged and under-cooked period piece, ‘River Queen’, a limp and unfocused jungle epic about a mother (Samantha Morton, decent) who loses her son to war. While the outré setting – 1860s New Zealand where indigenous Maori tribes are struggling to fend off European settlers – is certainly enough to pique the interest, you can never escape the fact that this story might have benefited from the composure and decisiveness of a Malick, a Mann or even (whisper it) a Costner to locate its pulse.
There’s no doubt, however, that Ward has a distinctive feel for combining colours on screen, yet he’s a visual stylist of limited creative breadth whose brash and busy compositions would perhaps have been better suited to a live-action Disney fantasia than a ‘serious’ costume drama. The pacing, too, is totally shot, with ‘emotional’ scenes needlessly (shamelessly, even) staggered to push the central maternal relationship.
Author: David Jenkins
Time Out London Issue 1956 Feb 13-19 2008
User reviews of this film
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- Ross' sossage. said...
- Posted on Feb 19 2008 12:07 This film is slighly less appealing that Ross jerking off in my bathroom.
- Report as inappropriate
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- skin head Joe said...
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Posted on Feb 19 2008 12:06
HELLO JOOE!!
its a poor film - Report as inappropriate
Cast & crew
Director: Vincent Ward
Producer: Chris Auty, Alun Bollinger
Cast: Samantha Morton, Kiefer Sutherland, Cliff Curtis full cast
Duration: 114 mins
UK Release: Feb 15 2008
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