Chirphymium
It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional
StyleSk8r
At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.
BelSports
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
SillyGayBoy
I had a year at a tiny boarding school when I was 16. This movie hits me hard. These places can be awful and weird and have huge character growth at the same time. My place was not nearly as bad but there were certainly illegal things.I love that this movie goes into the character growth of men, how people can be better, but also the evil of other people in these situations. These people can crush us or they can help us be strong if we handle things right.This movie is very dark, well acted, very good and compelling story. I just finished watching it a second time because I could not get it out of my head. This story is haunting. It sticks with me. It must have been an honor to be part of it.I was recommended the movie Boot Camp after I watched this but it does not touch this movie. Similar concepts but this movie is 1000 times better.
phoenixdudea
Really sick and disgusting. Full of non-stop gratuitous violence with absolutely zero redemptive quality. The people that made this horrendously awful piece-o-crap 'film' need to go thru some kind of remedial movie-making boot camp. (complete with the kind of egregious physical torture they induced thru out this abortion of a miscarriage called a 'movie'.) The only thing worse than the actors involved in this film, is the audience that is forced to sit thru it. This noir is a truly revolting, resoundingly repugnant waste of anyone's oxygen to spend any time at all viewing. Take a dump on this movie and spend your time watching paint dry. It will be much more fulfilling. This is the kind of 'film-making' that makes me believe anyone can make a film.. and amazingly.. some company will actually distribute it.. truly a wonder.. This is the worst movie I've seen in... well.. ever. Really, really, really, really bad!
ddcharbon
This film has a political agenda, one I happen to agree with. That is, there's something wrong with juvenile detention facilities that are de facto concentration camps, that have no legal oversight or laws pertaining to them and where many young men have died over the last thirty years and whose only justification for this legal carte blanche is that the parents are the ones "sentencing" their kids there. The torture is certainly disturbing. But unlike one of the reviewers, I don't see much in the way of character development here. And while the young actor--who is the spitting image of Ryan Gosling (he even _acts_ like him)--does a good job; he develops along very predictable lines. The other characters are fundamentally flat, especially the Colonel who remains a cipher throughout the film: we never learn really why he's such an asshole or what he thinks about his own asshole behavior. Character development for him turns out to be drinking more in the film's third act and fondling his pistol with suicidal thoughts. The film ends very disturbingly and certainly leaves a mark, as it were. But the final confrontation between Brad and the Colonel is absolutely wordless and without much depth--a problem with much of the film. I think it won at the film festivals for the disturbing violence yoked to its liberal politics, not for its storytelling.
C.H Newell
I'd been waiting to get a glimpse of Coldwater for some time; this afternoon, I finally got my chance. There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this film. We see the tale of a young man named Brad who, after some unfortunate incidents in his life (he is certainly at fault- there are no real attempts to gloss over his character in the beginning), is sent away to one of those youth rehabilitation camps, or better yet boot camps, like the ones you used to see on Maury back in the day. Once there, he realizes not only does he have to deal with what he's done in his life, but he also has to try and contend with the ex-colonel who runs the camp and the string of young psychotics he's given some authority to so they can help run the place. It's brutal at times, harsh. It speaks to what is going on today. People act like, oh poor privileged kids are sent to a camp where they're yelled at, big deal- just because it's not a war torn country these kids are in, just because they're not poor and starving, it does not make their plight any less real. These things are truly going on in life. No young person, regardless of their tendencies towards criminal behaviour, should be stabbed with keys, or beaten, or whipped, tortured in any fashion. This film speaks to many things going on around the world in the name of helping others, especially wayward youths.Mainly the acting really does it for me. The young man who plays Brad is wonderful, and I thought he did a great job throughout the entire film. Many of the young guys who had a significant amount of screen time really were spot on. James C. Burns did an amazing job of bringing to a life a real menace. Not only was the colonel character awful, he seemed to enjoy being awful, and it can't be easy for an actor to get into that sort of thing. Though the colonel is a bad man, it's interesting to see the character go through his own inner turmoil; one particular scene has him drinking Jack Daniels, puffing a cigar, chasing some of the young men he's charged with rehabilitating while they jog in front of him, and laughing himself to death. It's really raw, disturbing stuff.The end of the film is what essentially put this from 7 to an 8 stars out of 10 for me. I imagined it would come to a very different close, but about 10-15 minutes left I realized it was going somewhere a little further. It was intense, and really got to me. The end comes as bittersweet- Brad comes to terms with what he has done in the past by doing something that needed to be done in the present. I really don't want to ruin it, so I'll say no more. Great performances, pretty nice story, and the cinematography was well done. Highly recommend giving it a watch, especially if you enjoy prison-type stories; though this is more youth offenders, still along the same sort of fare.
