''Paradise Road'' opens with a terrific bang as the revelry in a swanky hotel ballroom in Singapore is shattered by Japanese bombs. For Prisoner Of War, Brutality and Violence, Ebert Symposium 2020: Part 2 Streaming Today, October 22nd, 2020, Everlasting Arms: The Sustained Power of The Night of the Hunter, Welcome to Judgment City: A Look Back at Defending Your Life. Director Bruce Beresford. Through it all, she maintains her impeccable boarding-school manners along with the indomitable self-confidence of a Great Lady serenely pulling herself up out of the mud. Running time: 110 minutes. Lots of them. Written and directed by Bruce Beresford, whose better-known works include “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Tender Mercies” and “Breaker Morant,” this film is intended as a tribute to a group of women who found a unique source of strength that enabled them to survive years of nightmarish imprisonment.

Rated R It isn't so much the music but Ms. Close's aura of holiness that momentarily softens the hearts of her vicious captors who, virtually hypnotized, sit down on the grass and drink in the ethereal choral rhapsody. The movie now has a delicate balance to find. Playing Adrienne Pargiter, the founder and conductor of an all-female vocal orchestra formed in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, Ms. Close is starved, humiliated, beaten and nearly killed. Endorsement: The Times endorses Hoffman, Anderson, Henderson and Han for LACCD. A warmhearted horror show that puts cliched movie people into a realistic situation, the signals it sends out are nothing but mixed. Among the more prominent are Margaret Drummond (Pauline Collins), a humble, sweet-natured Christian missionary who helps Adrienne organize the vocal orchestra, and Dr. Verstak (Frances McDormand), a cynical German-Jewish emigre who appoints herself the camp's resident physician and in-house smuggler of black-market goodies. But once a series of mishaps leads these women, the most visible of whom is tea planter’s wife Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close), to a Japanese prison camp on the island of Sumatra, the emotional texture gets dicier.

Paradise Road - Study Notes Overview: Beginning in February 1942 with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese, Paradise Road tells the story of a group of women from diverse backgrounds who struggle to endure the conditions of a Japanese prisoner of war camp on Sumatra. A group of women who are imprisoned on the island of Sumatra by the Japanese during World War II use music as relieve their misery.

''Paradise Road'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). If you were told this story by one of the survivors, you would shake your head in amazement and marvel at her courage.

But try as it might, “Paradise Road” can’t help being too purposefully uplifting for its own good, filled with non-surprising surprises and emotional epiphanies that are unenviable on the nose.

If you were told this story by one of the survivors, you would shake your head in amazement and marvel at her courage. Tanaka (Stan Egi), eager to act on his belief that “the time for rules has ended,” the camp’s guards unleash a barrage of savage beatings and graphic brutality on their prisoners, a scenario not likely to do much for Japan’s current image abroad. camp for men, standards for allowable on-screen brutality have considerably loosened, and “Paradise Road” takes full advantage of the change.

It is all here. Based on a true story, “Paradise Road” begins in Singapore on a February night in 1942.

Trivia collectors take note: “Shine” is no longer the only Australian film to use classical music as the key to a sentimental drama about the unbreakable resilience of the human spirit. Your guide to the 2020 election in California. Screenplay Bruce Beresford. It is 1942, and the supposedly impregnable city is being stormed by Japanese troops. (A lapse in the dialogue: When one woman seems tempted, another asks, “But what about the choir?”) Some women in such a position did choose to become prostitutes (some women in Raffles in 1942 no doubt had made that career choice even earlier).

Later when a Japanese officer forces her into the woods, either, she imagines, to rape or kill her, it turns out that all he wants to do is sing for her approval. The women are captured, they go to the camp, they suffer and endure, they perform their music, and then the war is over. The preview, as previews often do, goes further, and claims it as "the extraordinary true story". We meet the prisoners. Why do I want to see one of them sell her body and soul to the Japanese? Times guidelines: frequent and intense beatings of female prisoners.

Endorsements. They include a remarkable group of women: the British musician Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close); the Australian missionary Margaret Drummond, nicknamed Daisy (Pauline Collins); the nurse Susan Macarthy (Cate Blanchett); the German-accented Dr. Verstak (Frances McDormand), and an American painted in broad strokes, Topsy Merritt (Julianna Marguilies). We realize early on that prison life, within boundaries, will remain much the same until the film's end. For this bizarre audition, which suggests a parody of ''The King and I,'' Ms. Close is posed against a magnificently gnarled old tree, and a heavenly light streams across her face. The movie is an anecdote, not a story.

Together with Miss Drummond, Pargiter, a music student before she married, comes up with the scheme of forming their fellow inmates into a vocal orchestra, in effect having the women delicately hum their way through some of the great pieces of the classical music repertoire. In the stereotypical cross-section of prisoners, Ms. Close is the group's de facto leader, the upscale, matronly equivalent of a Dana Andrews character. You would probably think it would make a good movie: After all, it's even true. There was something in her voice that unsettled me. There is much to-do about the tension between the English and the Dutch prisoners who get into a brawl over a piece of soap. That story can’t help but be a bit heartening in its way, but it’s also a little too obvious at every turn. The scene is a typically overdramatized moment in a big, splashy film that feels unconvincing despite the fact that it is based on true incidents. It's almost as though this radiant creature were an Olympian statue who materialized like Glinda the Good Witch just in the nick of time to waft sweet music into an Oz that has turned into an inferno. The boat is sunk and survivors made it to the shore of an island that was already occupied by the Japanese military, where they are herded into a brutal prison camp. A look at California’s November ballot propositions. Women and some children are hurried aboard a transport ship, which is attacked a few days later by Japanese aircraft. Editor Tim Wellburn. Paradise Road is based on a true World War II story of a boat load of women and children fleeing the imminent Japanese occupation of the then British colony. … It’s not that that point isn’t well worth making, it’s rather too bad that the film doesn’t trust us to discover its truths more on our own. How to vote. Production design Herbert Pinter. From the director of Driving Miss Daisy comes a true story of courage, triumph, friendship and strength. Bruce Beresford’s feature film, Paradise Road, announces itself in large print to be "based on a true story". Watching it serves to underscore how skillful “Shine” was in sidestepping some of those same obstacles and cannily simulating emotional reality. The complete list of L.A. Times’ endorsements in the November 2020 election. It was difficult for me to accept Frances McDormand with a German accent (“Fargo” was too fresh in my mind), but I admired Pauline Collins (of “Shirley Valentine”), whose character's remarkable memory allows her to write down classical music so that they can rehearse it. The women are offered an alternative to the prison camp: If they volunteer to be prostitutes and please Japanese officers, they can live in a hotel with clean sheets, hot meals and nightly dances. Bruce Beresford's “Paradise Road” tells the story of a group of women who were held prisoner in a Japanese internment camp for most of World War II. It's not Ms. Close's fault that even Adrienne remains a mystery. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Executive producers Andrew Yap, Graham Burke.

It is 1942, and … Adrienne is one of hundreds of women assigned to a ship that in the movie's most spectacular scene is bombed by Japanese planes.