- Starring
- Sheila Vand, Matt Dillon, William Moseley
- Writers
- Shoja Azari, Jean-Claude Carrière
- Directors
- Shoja Azari, Shirin Neshat
- Rating
- n/a
- Running Time
- 113 minutes
- Release Date
- n/a
Overall Score
Rating Summary
This will be one of several reviews from this year’s Tribeca film Festival. To follow our coverage, click here.
Films that try to do something different from the rest, even if it doesn’t always work out, should be applauded. That being said, being different can also limit their appeal to potential audiences. A common avenue is using symbolism through a surrealist lens in order to communicate some sort of deeper message. Films like that ultimately live or die on whether or not audiences can get that message. In terms of Land of Dreams, it’s definitely out there but in the end, it never truly comes together. The result is an incoherent mess that absolutely goes nowhere and serves no purpose whatsoever. Instead of enlightening audiences, the film is more likely to leave a large portion of them baffled. All of this makes for a tedious chore to watch in spite of a lot of good the film does on a technical level, including production design and score. However, when audiences are bored, the other stuff doesn’t matter.
Land of Dreams is a sci-fi satire on paper without delivering on the satire. The story follows a woman named Simin (Vand) who works for the Census Bureau but it’s not just any Census Bureau. To better understand the population, she was part of the bureau’s new dream catching program where she and other dream catchers set out to record the dreams of citizens. Little did she know, this was part of a more devious plot but the film never goes to that point. As a result, it merely meanders as Simin, her bodyguard Alan (Dillon), and an obsessed suitor named Mark (Moseley) aimlessly roam the American southwest. Though their banter could only go so far, the characters were simply dull therefore it was hard to care about anything that happened to them over the course of the film. While it was clear that there was some deeper meaning behind the story, that deeper meaning is sure to go over a lot of heads.
The performances were fine but at the end of the day, Land of Dreams is a misfire that is likely to miss more than hit with audiences.
still courtesy of Tribeca
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.