Radiant City

"Ah suburbia, one of the favourite whipping boys for creative types. Combining expert opinion on the topic with the lives of the Moss family, who are new additions to one such neighbourhood, is Radiant City - the latest slice of culture to step up and take its shot. Instead of a potentially dry audiovisual essay, it dishes up a strong argument delivered in a dramatic style."

"This enlightening and disturbingly funny critique of North American suburban sprawl might've been dry or dull as a straightforward doc. But in the hands of Canadian co-directors Gary Burns (waydowntown) and journalist Jim Brown, a forceful buckshot of damning animated statistics and talking-head rants from urban theorists (including iconoclastic author James Howard Kunstler) energizes a satirical day-in-the-life narrative mock-doc starring the fictitious, newly suburbanized Moss family."

"It takes a while to get into the rhythm set up by Burns and journalist Jim Brown, which mixes real-life tract-home dwellers with social experts, including the articulate writer who sums up most suburban development as "brutal, depressing and spiritually degrading." The pic gets gradually more absorbing as the drama seeps into everyday events."

"James Howard Kunstler, a critic of suburbanization, appears throughout “Radiant City” and helps define its tone, which could be described as one of incredulous lament. The cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin’s eerie, sometimes monumental images italicize the experts’ statements, making the suburbs seem like an asphalt-and-Sheetrock dreamscape where democracy goes to die."