Slant Magazine gives 3.5 of our 4 Stars
Another nice review:
Like the central angelic figures in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, The Unforeseen evokes the point of view of a divine being observing our species’ modern history—only here they’re mourning what they’ve borne witness to.
Full article here.
The Onion AV Club gives Movie B+
The Onion gave the film a nice review.
Although the parts of The Unforeseen dealing with the anti-development movement are pure go-team agitprop, Dunn lends the movie a lyrical cast by combining aerial shots of the transformed countryside with the voice of Wendell Berry, reading from his poem “Sabbaths.” With cinematography by Richard Linklater stalwart Lee Daniel, and executive production by Robert Redford and Terrence Malick, the movie wavers between Sundance-friendly issue film and spiritual reverie.
You can read the full review here.
Film Journal International calls it “A rapturous nightmare.”
Maybe it’s the despairer in me, but that contends for favorite three-word review. Here are excerpts from Chris Barsanti’s review…
A documentary that looks like an art-house film, The Unforeseen wields its impressive cinematography and poetic narrative form (Wendell Berry provides appropriately ruminative narration) to make a strong case that the country as a whole is cutting itself off from the natural world with frightening speed. The camera glides through endless construction sites and hovers over the octopus-armed suburban developments with a cool dread. All the while, these montages of a deadening, choking future are contrasted with crystalline underwater images. The spirit of Terrence Malick—who serves as executive producer here—is everywhere in the film, from its dreamy evocation of nature’s small miracles to the humane treatment of those who in normal circumstances would be viewed as villains.
One of the great documentaries of our time, The Unforeseen is a rapturous nightmare.
Read the full review here.
IndieWIRE reviews “The Unforeseen”
Some highlights from the new Indiewire review.
Due to the onslaught of environmental documentaries that prioritize urgency over intelligence, Laura Dunn’s “The Unforeseen,” an inquisitive, elegant rendering of the battle between land development and dwindling natural resources in Austin, might get lost in the shuffle. And what a shame that would be, for Dunn’s refreshingly thorough look at the encroachment of capital on untouched land is smart enough not to treat its subject as a horror show. The film is more sobered than alarming, yet it’s hardly defeatist. An impressionist’s portrait of contemporary American economic life, “The Unforeseen” is for nature both a paean and an elegy, and for contemporary American nonfiction a challenge, in both scope and aesthetic…
…Indeed there are occasional shots of glistening cobwebs, slow-motion underwater swimmers, and sunlight streaming through fog-shrouded trees that will inevitably recall Malick’s work, yet Dunn’s film isn’t a simple retreat into nature, nor is it a reducible portrait of greed (an emotional outburst from Bradley at the end is captured with true sympathy, even awe). Instead it’s a document for posterity, diagnosing our moment with refreshing pragmatism. As merciless and propulsive as rushing water, Dunn’s film is constantly moving forward, all the way into its stunning final images, which map out our country’s soul with mournful deliberation.
Full review here.
NY’s Time Out Reviews The Unforeseen
Time Out NY’s brief and positive review is included in its entirety here.
Visually rich, narratively ambitious social-problem docs are as uncommon as point-and-shoot nonfiction harangues (and the ills they chronicle) are abundant, so Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen is a rare gift. Plainspoken yet urgent, it makes the wrist-slashingly depressing topic of real-estate development somehow transcendent.This is partly the influence of executive producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford (the latter of whom appears a little too extensively on camera), which in one sense makes the film a fascinating, unexpected collaboration between two Indiewood warhorses. But it’s Dunn who finds languid lyricism in the central theme of humanity’s (or Texans’, anyway) exploitation of nature. She does so largely by approaching the issue at hand—the parceling of an Austin suburban enclave and its potential for wholesale land-rape—obliquely and with an eye toward the cosmic. One memorable scene, in which a surly, development-friendly legislator assembles a model bomber plane as he’s being interviewed, tells us more about “the deserted prospect of the modern mind” (to quote the Wendell Berry poem that gives the film its title) than a thousand well-meaning lectures from Al Gore. Committed and life-affirming without being naive or strident, The Unforeseen is the movie An Inconvenient Truth wanted to be.
The Village Voice reviews The Unforeseen
The Village Voice has mentioned The Unforeseen twice before, once for Human Rights Watch Festival and then for Sundance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But with the film’s true NY release happening in a few days, it has just written its first true review. Here are a few highlights from it…
True, The Unforeseen—a haunting meditation on hubris and the folly of claiming rights over something as elemental (and temperamental) as the environment—can be seen as part of a small but growing canon of ecological-alarm documentaries, a genre broad and urgent enough to encompass the PowerPoint apocalypse of An Inconvenient Truth, the countdown-to-Armageddon jeremiad of The 11th Hour, and the mountaintop-removal broadside of Black Diamonds. But the qualities that make The Unforeseen ineffective as a shrieking call to arms—among them a tone that’s less hectoring than contemplative, and an unusual sympathy for the opposition—make it vastly more absorbing as a movie…
…the movie’s glacial pace and willingness to let its mind and eye wander that produces its spiritual and intellectual heft—not to mention its atypical visual splendor. The idea for the film came from executive producer Terrence Malick, himself a longtime Austinite, and cinematographer Lee Daniel’s texture-besotted HD/Super 16 imagery evokes the rapturous transcendentalist quality that surfaces in Malick’s own films: the weight of rain on grass, the play of magic-hour light on a creek. Through its transfixing glimpses of the natural world and an agrarian lifestyle at risk, The Unforeseen ponders nothing less than what happens when we turn our backs on the divine.
This well-written review emphasizes aspects no other reviewer has. Read the entire review here.
Film Comment - Film Review + Critics Poll
Two Film Comment items.
First, the January/February issue contains a complete review of the film. If you’re wondering, Gavin Smith’s comments about the film weren’t a formal review, rather, remarks about the Sundance Festival he had attended.
The review, written by Paul Fileri, opens with:
“With environmental documentaries like Darwin’s Nightmare, Our Daily Bread and Manufactured Landscapes appearing in recent years and many more looming on the horizon, any nonfiction film holding lasting critical value will have to do more than lay out a portrait of ecological degradation. At the same time it will have to avoid settling into reportage and exposé, retreating into nostalgic lament, or falling prey to easy solutions and wishful thinking. With her intelligent and formally accomplished debut feature The Unforeseen, Laura Dunn has shown herself to be up to the task, bringing clear-eyed reflection to bear on modern capitalism, urban development, and globalization, probing the systems of economic and social power that shape our everyday lives as well as our loftier sense of nature as a whole.”
To read the rest of the review, pick up a copy at your local newsstand.
Critics Poll
In addition, Film Comment released their annual critics poll of best films of 2007. The Unforeseen captured lucky number 13 on the “Undistributed” list.
http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/poll/2007pollcritics.html
FILM COMMENT’S END-OF-YEAR CRITICS’ POLL
For Film Comment’s Eighth Annual Critics’ Poll we invited our contributors and colleagues to rank their top 20 films of the year, plus the 10 best unreleased films they discovered on any festival sorties. (In the latter category, 11 had their U.S. premieres at the 44th New York Film Festival and at least three more will be shown in our annual Film Comment Selects series.) In each ballot from the 80-plus critical chorus, a first-place choice was allotted 20 points, 19 for second, and so on. We published the results for the Top 20 in the current issue. Here are the Top 50 released and Top 30 unreleased.
BEST UNRELEASED FILMS OF 2007
(*Currently without U.S. distribution)
1. Silent Light Carlos Reygadas, Mex./Fr./Neth. 175
2. Flight of the Red Balloon Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tai./Fr. 171
3. Paranoid Park Gus Van Sant, France/U.S. 134
4. Secret Sunshine Lee Chang-dong, S. Korea 127
5. My Winnipeg Guy Maddin, Canada 97
6. Useless* Jia Zhang-Ke, China/Hong Kong 95
7. Still Life Jia Zhang-Ke, China/Hong Kong 91
8. In the City of Sylvia* José Luis Guerín, Spain 76
9. The Last Mistress Catherine Breillat, France/Italy 70
10. The Romance of Astrée and Céladon* Eric Rohmer, France/Italy/Spain 57
11. The Duchess of Langeais Jacques Rivette, Fr./Ger. 68
12. Alexandra Alexander Sokurov, France/Russia 44
13. The Unforeseen Laura Dunn, U.S. 43
14. Go Go Tales* Abel Ferrara, Italy/U.S. 41
15. Battle for Haditha Nick Broomfield, U.K. 37
16. Mister Lonely Harmony Korine, U.K./France/Ireland/U.S. 36
17. The Pool* Chris Smith, U.S. 35
18. George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead George A. Romero, U.S. 33
19. Chop Shop Ramin Bahrani, U.S. 32
20. Encounters at the End of the World Werner Herzog, U.S 29
(tie) Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind* John Gianvito, U.S. 29
21. Reprise Joachim Trier, Norway 28
22. The Man from London* Béla Tarr, Fr./Ger./Hun. 26
23. The Edge of Heaven Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey 25
(tie) La France* Serge Bozon, France 25
(tie) The Silence Before Bach Pere Portabella, Spain 25
24. At Sea* Peter Hutton, U.S. 22
(tie) Boarding Gate Olivier Assayas, France 22
(tie) California Dreamin’* Cristian Nemescu, Romania 22
25. Chicago 10 Brett Morgen, U.S. 20
(tie) Dust Hartmut Bitomsky, Germany 20
26. Chronicle of a Chinese Woman* Bing Wang, China 19
(tie) I’m a Cyborg, But That’s OK* Park Chan-wook, S. Korea 19
(tie) Taxi to the Dark Side Alex Gibney, U.S. 19
27. Calle Sante Fe* Carmen Castillo, Chile/France/Belgium 18
(tie) Glue Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina/U.K. 18
(tie) SpaceDisco One* Damon Packard, U.S. 18
28. Frownland* Ronald Bronstein, U.S. 17
(tie) I Just Didn’t Do It* Masayuki Suo, Japan 18
(tie) Lou Reed’s Berlin* Julian Schnabel, U.S./U.K. 17
(tie) Snow Angels David Gordon Green, U.S. 17
29. Caramel Nadine Labaki, France/Lebanon 16
(tie) Import Export Ulrich Seidl, Austria 16
30. Actresses Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, France 15
Filmcritic.com - The Best Unreleased films of 2007
The film got this recent writeup from Filmcritic.com.
11. The Unforeseen - Fellow critic Chris Barsanti aptly defined Laura Dunn’s sublime documentary as “more elegy than position paper” in his coverage of 2007’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival. The same can be said about the work of the film’s most prominent producers: Terrance Malick and Robert Redford. In telling the story of land developers in Austin, Texas and the Biblical struggle over the area known as Barton Springs, Dunn’s magnificently visual feature-length debut sidesteps grandstanding and ventures for a more personal brand of political portrayal. The eye of the storm centers on a greedy (not evil) land developer who lost all his money and pride on the project while the large corporations backing him went onto their next pet project. Texan talking heads range from lobbyists for both sides of the aisle to Willie Nelson to Redford himself putting in their two cents on the issue but they are tapestries for all intents and purposes. Ultimately, it’s Dunn’s use of imagery, working with cinematographer Lee Daniel (a frequent collaborator of Richard Linklater), which edges The Unforeseen into the select lineage of environmental documentaries that transcend both environmentalism and documentary filmmaking.
Film Journey’s Review
Film Journey’s Doug Cummings wrote a nice review for the film. In his intro, he also neatly summarized the marketing challenge the film faces.
My favorite documentary at AFI FEST turned out to be one I had initially passed on. The Unforeseen was described in the catalogue as “the story of how big developers spoiled a city treasure, and about the consequences continued development has on us all,” which didn’t exactly sound like cinematic gold. But after talking with critic Robert Koehler, who assured me that I couldn’t miss it, I did some last-minute rearranging and was very glad I did.
Sadly, the film will become even more relevant as we witness bankruptcies hit bigger home builders, mortgage lenders and investment firms. (Thanks Mish)
Eye Weekly gave the film another plug
Adam Nayman recently gave the film a 5 star review in advance of the Vancouver Film Fest. Now, only a few weeks later, he offers a different slant, though no less positive, for Toronto’s Planet in Focus festival.
The best film on display this year happens to be the last: Laura Dunn’s The Unforeseen (Oct. 28, 7pm, Royal, 608 College) is probably the American documentary of the year. It’s the story of an oasis within an oasis — a limestone aquifer in the middle of Austin, Texas that served in the 1970s as a sort of ground zero for the city’s famously left-leaning constituency. The real estate developers looking to raze the area were rebuffed, time and again, until the election of a certain smirking Texas governor in the mid-1990s left the back door wide open.
It’s an infuriating development, but the story is larger than Texas: its subject is nothing less than the death of idealism, and Dunn is generous enough to allow her apparent villain — the former wunderkind developer at the centre of the conflict — his own heartfelt lament. She also neatly integrates the seemingly disparate aesthetic imperatives of her famous producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, resulting in a film that’s both achingly lyrical and blisteringly direct.
I know I speak for Laura when I say that I don’t know where the film would be without critics. It’s not exactly the feel-good movie of the summer. We really owe folks like Gavin Smith, Robert Koehler, both Nathan Lee and Scott Foundas at Village Voice and Adam Nayman an enormous debt of gratitude for their writeups.
[p.s. We’re also grateful to the Federal Reserve, CDOs and the collapsing mortgage market for increasing the topicality! ]
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About The Unforeseen
The Unforeseen, executive produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford, premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Called "the best film at the festival, hands down" by Film Comment's Gavin Smith, the film documents the struggles between development and preservation of Austin Texas.