Posted in: Disc Reviews by William O'Donnell on December 4th, 2011
This historical film looks at the three-year siege of Leningrad during World War 2. The film follows a Russian, female police officer who aids a stranded, English news reporter as they try to survive the siege. Said survival goes beyond enduring the battles between Russian and German forces as a lot of focus is placed on the starvation of the denizens of Leningrad as supplies become desperately limited and the people must live off of 300 grams of rations a day, an amount that declines as days go by.
There is a nice balance between depictions of those fighting the battles and civilians just trying to survive. The battles themselves are accurately brutal at times, and the city of Leningrad is looks as cold and wreaked with famine as its inhabitants. Visually, this film does a wonderful job of recreating the horrible images of war. There are dead bodies frozen on the streets and battlefields that the characters have to become acclimatized to.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on July 6th, 2009
“If you look closely, you’ll find that everything has a weak spot, where it can break….”
The same can be said for Fracture. There are plenty of flaws, and if you look hard enough you can find a lot of problems with everything from the story to the performances. Thankfully these flaws are quite minor and require the kind of scrutiny that would likely ruin almost any movie experience. I taught law for about 7 years and make it a bit of a (bad?) habit to look for the errors in court and legal procedures. I found plenty here, but they aren’t all that obvious or that detrimental to the plot. You’ll find errors in such trifles as chain of custody for evidence and the admissibility of certain types of testimony. If you’re a student of the law you’ll take note, as I did, and then hopefully move on. There’s too much compelling stuff here to allow yourself to miss out because of some rather common legal mistakes.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by David Annandale on November 17th, 2003
Synopsis