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Monster's Ball (2001)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:141
Fresh:120
Rotten:21
Average Rating:7.4/10
Consensus: Somber and thought provoking, Monster's Ball has great performances all around.
Runtime: 1 hr 53 mins
Genre: Dramas
US Box Office: $31,252,964
Synopsis:
MONSTER'S BALL is a hard hitting Southern drama tempered by a story of powerful, life-changing love. It is the story of Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), an embittered prison guard working on Death Row...
MONSTER'S BALL is a hard hitting Southern drama tempered by a story of powerful, life-changing love. It is the story of Hank (Billy Bob Thornton), an embittered prison guard working on Death Row who begins an unlikely, but emotionally charged affair with Leticia (Halle Berry), the wife of a man he has just executed. MONSTER'S BALL also features Heath Ledger and Peter Boyle. Boyle plays Hank’s bigoted, aging father, whose hatred seems to have poisoned his entire family as much as the family business, which is working on the prison Death Squad. Ledger plays Hank’s son, who is hell-bent on getting out of the family business. The film is directed by award-winning filmmaker Marc Forster. He was nominated for an IFP/West Spirit Award as Best Low Budget Feature and won the Movado "Someone to Watch" Prize at the 2001 Spirit Awards for his film, "Everything Put Together."
Set in Georgia, MONSTER'S BALL was filmed entirely on location in and around New Orleans, Louisiana and at the notorious Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola (also known as "The Farm").
MONSTER'S BALL is from an original screenplay by Milo Addica and Will Rokos, is produced by Lee Daniels, executive produced by Mark Urman, Mike Paseornek, and co-produced by Milo Addica and Will Rokos. Lions Gate Films will release the film in December, 2001. -- © 2001 Lions Gate Films
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Heath Ledger, Peter Boyle
Starring: Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Heath Ledger, Peter Boyle, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Mos Def
Director: Marc Forster
Director: Marc Forster
Screenwriter: Milo Addica, Will Rokos
Studio: Lions Gate Films
Reviews for Monster's Ball
Yes, Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry give Oscar caliber performances. But so do Peter Boyle and Puff Daddy. When all the performances are excellent, critics' understand it's the direction.
This complex, rich film dwells in the shades of grey, never offering an easy answer and always leaving us with questions.
Director Marc Forster shapes his love story like a master potter, forming a story of pure love, untainted by cliché.
A textbook example of fearless filmmaking, exhibiting a brand of gritty realism that's hard to watch but impossible to ignore.
less a love story than a movie about love — about how it leeches into disparate hearts and desperate circumstances, about raw and unlikely and redemptive it can be
As oddly comforting as it is unsettling, Monster's Ball honors novelist E.M. Forster's famed dictum: 'Only Connect.'
The kind of quiet, effective film that burrows under the viewer's skin and takes root before you've had a chance to realize that it's permeated your constitutional makeup.
While Billy Bob transforms terrifically from a bigot to a noble man in a biracial relationship, Halle is just plain brilliant as a poor and exhausted woman who finally reaches her breaking point.
The best thing Marc Forster's direction does is take these characters through their experiences at a convincingly naturalistic respiratory rate...
The movie has the complexity of great fiction, and requires our empathy as we interpret the decisions that are made.
A serious movie made by seriously talented people, and I never quite came 'round to it.
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