The struggle of a young musician.
20 Feb, 2015
1 hrs 47 mins
TRENDING STORIES
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SYNOPSIS
A nineteen year old aspiring drummer, Andrew gets handpicked to play in a Jazz band by a music teacher, who uses intimidation to mentor his students to perfection.
CAST
J. K. Simmons
Actor
Paul Reiser
Actor
Jayson Blair
Actor
Miles Teller
Actor
Melissa Benoist
Actor
Kavita Patil
Actor
Nate Lang
Actor
Damon Gupton
Actor
Johnny Simmons
Actor
Lindsay Duncan
Actor
CREW
Damien Chazelle
Director| Writer|
Jason Blum
Producer|
Justin Hurwitz
Musician|
Jason Reitman
Executive Producer|
Couper Samuelson
Executive Producer|
Jeanette Volturno
Executive Producer|
Sharone Meir
Cinematographer|
Tom Cross
Editor|
Lisa Norcia
Costume Designer|
Michel Litvak
Producer|
Helen Estabrook
Producer|
Gary Michael Walters
Executive Producer|
Telegraph
This dazzling, exhilarating drama from the young American director Damien Chazelle isnt a story about the roles played by misery and humiliation in forging a great artist. Its a story about what happens when people believe thats how great artists must be forged: both the mentors raining down pressure and the pupils whose souls are on the anvil. Andrew (Miles Teller) is a talented, dedicated 19-year-old drummer at the fictional Schaffer Conservatory of Music in New York City. Hes cherry-picked for a place in the schools studio jazz band by Terence Fletcher (Golden Globe winner JK Simmons), a conductor who wanders the halls at night, his footsteps a metronomic clack-clack-clack, listening out for prospective young Charlie Parkers he can hammer into brilliance.
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The Guardian
Three cheers, then, for one-time aspiring-drummer Damien Chazelle, writer/director of this whip-smart feature (adapted from his 2013 short) about a young wannabe jazz-legend earning his spurs at a fiercely competitive music school. With its scenes of our embattled hero plunging his bruised and bloodied hands into buckets of iced water while a tyrannical music instructor showers him with excoriating epithets and throws chairs at his head, this owes less to the reach-for-the-stars formulas of Fame than it does to the now-familiar beats of boot-camp and boxing movies.
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Roger Ebert
"Whiplash" is cinematic adrenalin. In an era when so many films feel more refined by focus groups or marketing managers, it is a deeply personal and vibrantly alive drama. Damien Chazelle has taken a relatively staid subject like the relationship between a music student and his teacher and turned it into a thriller built on a brilliant undercurrent of social commentary about what it takes to make it in an increasingly competitive and cutthroat world. How far are you willing to push yourself to succeed? How far are you willing to push someone else to force them on the path to success? Carried by two electric performances, the tightest editing in a film this year and a daring screenplay that writes itself into a corner and then somehow finds an unexpected way out, "Whiplash" is as breathless as a drum solo, rising and falling just as the hopes and dreams of its protagonist climb and crash.
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