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The online film magazine Combustible Celluloid offers new movie reviews, DVD reviews, film reviews, actor interviews, actress interviews, director interviews, film books and all things cinema related for the thoughtful and passionate. Online for ten years! Over 3000 reviews!

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Limbo (1999)

Rating: 3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Upstream

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Buy Limbo on DVD.

Writer and director John Sayles (Lone Star) just keeps getting better and better. Limbo is a typically intelligent and literate movie set in an Alaskan fishing village. He spends the first 80 minutes or so introducing us to characters, their nuances, and their conflicts. Then suddenly, he strands three of them, fisherman David Strathairn, singer Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and her daughter Vanessa Martinez, on a remote inlet where no one, except for a pair of killers (who we never see), knows where they are. Like the salmon we see swimming upstream at several points during the movie, the goal is not important -- it's how you spend the journey. This is a great movie.

DVD Details: Extras include an audio commentary track by John Sayles, a trailer for The Secret of Roan Inish, and an isolated music soundtrack.

Starring: David Strathairn, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Vanessa Martinez, Kris Kristofferson
Written by: John Sayles
Directed by: John Sayles
MPAA Rating: R for language
Running Time: 126 minutes
Date: June 4, 1999