FIND MOVIES
Movie List
Loading ...
or
Find Theaters and Movie Times
or
Search Movies

Flow

A somewhat wishy-washy exposé
By PETER KEOUGH  |  September 24, 2008
2.5 2.5 Stars

flowinside.jpg

Enough, already: instead of goading us with bits and pieces of the doom-and-gloom picture, some documentarian should come up with a unified theory of why we’re all screwed. Meanwhile, Irina Salina’s exposé hits us close to home — right at the water tap. Who knew that our drinking water was tainted with rocket fuel, or that between 500,000 and seven million people in this country suffer from water-borne diseases every year? And not only is the water polluted, but it’s running out, so savvy multi-national corporations like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé, with the collusion of the IMF, are buying up the world’s supply so they can make a killing. A slickly made flurry of talking heads and talking points, Flow can be as wishy-washy and dispersed as the title, percolating from the US to the Ganges to Lesotho, the argument not as important as the surging montage and the Philip Glass–like soundtrack. It ends with images of the people marching and a Web site, but somehow I suspect that’s not going to be enough. 84 minutes | Kendall Square

Related: Review: Frozen, Review: Planet 51, Review: The Hangover, More more >
  Topics: Reviews , Philip Glass, International Monetary Fund, Flow,  More more >
| More


Most Popular
ARTICLES BY PETER KEOUGH
Share this entry with Delicious
  •   REVIEW: WUTHERING HEIGHTS [2012]  |  October 19, 2012
    Merchant-Ivory this is not. Nor is it any Emily Brontë we've seen before.
  •   INTERVIEW: ANDREA ARNOLD'S ROMANTIC REALISM  |  October 18, 2012
    People in love do crazy things, especially in Andrea Arnold's films. So adapting Emily Brontë's masterpiece of pathological love, Wuthering Heights , came naturally.
  •   REVIEW: SISTER  |  October 18, 2012
    Increasingly popular among American independent filmmakers, the school of miserabilism — starkly dramatizing the poor, wretched, and unjustly deprived — has thrived in Europe.
  •   REVIEW: GIRL MODEL  |  October 10, 2012
    As seen in David Redmon and Ashley Sabin's somber, sometimes poetic, Fred Wiseman-like documentary, the international model trade ranks just above human trafficking in legitimacy.
  •   REVIEW: WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971)  |  October 10, 2012
    Combining elements of Heart of Darkness , After Hours , and Groundhog Day , Ted Kotcheff's brutally brilliant Outback thriller follows the moral degradation, or perhaps redemption, of a snooty schoolteacher (Gary Bond) traveling from the backwater where he's assigned to Sydney for his Christmas vacation.

 See all articles by: PETER KEOUGH