Venice. Vegas: Based on a True Story.

"This no-budget, digitally shot parable from Iran-born writer-director Amir Naderi has a long fuse and a tragic payoff," writes Time's Richard Corliss.

"Disdaining dramatic filigree, Naderi reveals the consuming obsessiveness of addiction, as Eddie [Mark Greenfield] pursues the American dream of prospecting for gold in his own backyard. If you have ever shared that dream, that disease, [Vegas: Based on a True Story] could bore into your gut."

Writing in Variety, Ronnie Scheib finds "a film of such single-minded desolation that it recalls Victor Seastrom's account of elemental madness, The Wind, as a destructive force rips through a family in precarious remission from full-blown addiction. Naderi's stated goal, to wed his more experimental recent work to a strong narrative throughline, has been realized with a vengeance."

"There's a promising idea for a film here, but the heavy-handed Vegas labors every point well beyond audience tolerance: that Eddie can't control his impulse to gamble, that Tracy [Nancy La Scala] is a control freak, that the land and house are fated to be wiped out by greedy obsession," writes Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter. "This kind of story cries out for a strong, experienced cast which might have kept it from dramatically flat-lining."

"Once - and if - the viewer gets past the film's deliberately ugly feel, there's a pretty powerful story in Vegas that has resonance on several levels," writes Fionnuala Halligan in Screen Daily. "This is a film will undoubtedly have - and deserves - a life; the question is where?"

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2008 9:06 AM