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Dominican Rep. Cradle Will Rock
- Original title
- Cradle Will Rock
- Year
- 1999
- Running time
- 132 min.
- Country
United States- Director
- Screenwriter
- Cast
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Hank Azaria
Rubén Blades
Joan Cusack
John Cusack
Susan Sarandon
Vanessa Redgrave
John Turturro
Philip Baker Hall
Bill Murray
Emily Watson
Cherry Jones
Angus MacFadyen
Cary Elwes- See all credits
- Music
- Cinematography
- Producer
- Genre
- Drama | Stage Play. Ensemble Film
- Synopsis
- "Based on a (mostly) true story," according to the opening titles, Tim Robbins's dazzling dramatization of one of the great stories in American theater indeed takes a few liberties with history. Ostensibly the story of the mayhem surrounding Marc Blitzstein's worker's opera The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles for the WPA at the height of the Depression, Robbins paints a veritable mural around this incident, a city alive with plotting industrialists (John Cusack as Nelson Rockefeller), radical artists (Ruben Blades's Diego Rivera), and struggling citizens (Bill Murray's frustrated vaudeville ventriloquist Tommy Crickshaw). Lightning strikes when the government closes the show before it even opens and the cast marches 20 blocks to an empty theater and tosses the staging aside to perform in the aisles, the balconies, and the seats. It's a rare moment of cinema capturing the immediacy and charge of live theater on the screen and it's the heart of Robbins's often exhilarating film. His heroes are Blitzstein (a warm, gently impassioned Hank Azaria) and cheery WPA Theater director Hallie Flanagan (Broadway star Cherry Jones), but in the process he snidely turns Welles and producer John Houseman into sour, silly caricatures. The stew of artistic creation and political action gets murky and at times contradictory, but vivid performances and Robbins' driving pace and staccato crosscutting keep it humming through even the most didactic moments.
- Awards
-
1999: Cannes Film Festival: Nominated for Palme d'Or (Best Film)1999: National Board of Review: Top Ten Films, Special Achievement Award (Tim Robbins)1999: Satellite Awards: nominated to Actor in a Supporting Rol, Comedy or Musical.
- Critics' reviews
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"One of the year's most purely entertaining movies"
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"Commands respect as mainstream filmmaking with more of an agenda than just pimping cinematic junk food to the brain-dead masses."
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"A missed opportunity to shed light on one of America's most turbulent times."
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"An ensemble cast brimming with great theater actors and movie stars tears into a collection of meaty, moving, funny roles, with largely vibrant results."
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"There is hardly a moment during this overlong, stunningly smug exercise in moral self-satisfaction when you actually care about a character, real or invented."
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"Succeeds far more often than not in delivering a credible, kaleidoscopic portrait of creative, and often famous, individuals."
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