Held me spellbound for three hours, if nothing else (extended cut, fwiw). 25th HOUR-ish - New York movie, moral drama about Doing the Right Thing, symphonic score over jagged rhythms - also Desplechin-ish for the sweep and scale, but more ambitious than either: an epic of human disconnection, based around the fact that language is such an imperfect way of trying to connect - emotion is easier, but we lose it as we grow older ("It is Margaret you mourn for"), and of course Art is the best way of all - and around the fact that people are quite simply separate, everyone has a point of view (even the kid who thinks Shakespeare was talking about a "higher consciousness"…

Much has been made of Margaret’s troubled journey to the screen; a journey involving lawsuits, multiple edits and a long delayed release. It only seems fitting that a film about a character’s internal turmoil and city’s trauma would have such a difficult gestation. Like the character at the centre of the story, the film is admirable in its intelligence but tough to actually like.

Margaret focuses on Lisa an articulate, self-absorbed and emotionally scattershot teenage girl. She goes against the convention of what a protagonist should be as it is nearly impossible to warm to her as a person, yet despite her prickly personality she feels like a believable teen and in that way is strangely relatable. Following a traumatic,…

So I watched this a while ago, but that was the theatrical cut. That cut was 2.5 hours and I felt it was either too long or too short. Just like everyone else who's been reading about this film, I was both anxious and excited to see the longer director's cut. I'm so glad I did! The extended cut is simply better in every sense possible. Lonnergan doesn't add back a ton of scenes, but the ones he did add were absolutely necessary to sympathizing with Lisa's character, and he succeeded. I feel like I owe Lisa an apology for being so harsh in my last review, because the shorter cut made her seem like an abrupt and horrible person.…

Wow, what a lightning bolt of a film. Rumblings of a powerful tour de force are apparent from the beginning, but when it hits you, it doesn't let up. This ambitious, sprawling drama is a near-masterpiece, if it wasn't constantly drowning in a sea of subplots.

The main crux of "Margaret" is about a girl, Lisa (not Margaret as you'd expect), who inadvertently causes an accident involving a bus and a pedestrian. This accident unfortunately co-incides with this little thing called adolescence. While the confusion of politics, sex, drugs, family, friends swell up in the environment of high school life, Lisa is tangled in a very adult situation. The prima donna attitude typical of a privileged teenage girl characterizes Lisa…

This film is a mess, a glorious mess, but a mess none the less. It's extremely scatterbrained and it's tone is all over the place (sometimes in the same scene) but this helps with the story as it is essentially the story of a scatterbrained teenager dealing with very heavy cimcumstances. There is an amazing masterpiece of a film in here somewhere but the finished product isn't quite it. That being said they're some perfect scenes in this and Anna Paquin, who I'm not the biggest fan of, gives one of the best performances I've seen in a while. This film was shot in 2005 and spent the rest of the time in the editing room and post production hell.…

At one point in "Margaret" a high school lit student makes the observation that sometimes Shakespeare wrote characters from viewpoints he didn't necessarily agree with. Then, in the words of 17-year-old Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), another "spoiled, liberal Jew" in the class argues that in "King Lear", when he wrote "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport" the author wasn't questioning man's place in the universe. Is it so unthinkable that a white bread NYC teacher (Matthew Broderick) and a thousand French scholars' views be wrong? Maybe Shakespeare wasn't questioning man -- he was questioning the gods.

This isn't the beginning or the end. It's just another puzzle piece in…

Margaret – Two and a Half hours in the company of an over privileged teen who plays her part in the accidental death of a stranger. She then spends the majority of the films copious running time maliciously and pugnaciously trying to ruin the life of the other guilty party just to appease her own guilt. Shot in 2005 and held up for release for 6 years, the film sits firmly in the shadow of 9/11 and sort of works as an analogy of America’s reluctance to concede that foreign policy may have been a contributing factor to the events of that day.

However the film takes its sweet time to make the point, all the while we have to…