The best thing Marc Forster's direction does is take these characters through their experiences at a convincingly naturalistic respiratory rate...
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
Like an exposed nerve -- raw, intensely painful and keenly aware of its surroundings.
Using a quietly observational style, [Forster] captures fleetingly touching, sporadically horrific and mostly unvarnished moments of universal experience, unadorned by judgment or sentiment.
Does little more than toy with the passions of two Georgia families torn apart by violence.
It's Berry who sets the pace. Her performance is a triumph of emotion and abandon.
Raw moments of naked emotion rip through the contrived tragedies of the script and Forster's careful control and choreography.
A stunning achievement that features Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry in career-defining performances.
The low-key performances by Thornton and Berry are so deeply felt that you feel like a cell mate in their emotional prisons.
As oddly comforting as it is unsettling, Monster's Ball honors novelist E.M. Forster's famed dictum: 'Only Connect.'
Forster successfully navigates small-town American Gothic terrain, brilliantly detailing not only the association between grief and self-destruction, but also grief's capacity to engineer profound redemption.
Although director Marc Forster pulls decent performances from both Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry, coincidence-filled plotting, lame dialogue, and ham-fisted symbolism repeatedly undermine his best intentions.
Directed with great intelligence, sensitivity and restraint by Marc Forster.
If the tale is explicit in content, it's admirably restrained in the telling, and that tension makes the movie compelling to watch.
The movie has the complexity of great fiction, and requires our empathy as we interpret the decisions that are made.
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