Customer Rating: 
Summary: Sure beats Disney!
Comment: I'm NOT Indian, but I agree completely with baylor in the previous review.
This is a very good film...I own it...watch it maybe once a year - and NOT at bedtime - because I am tired of all the feel-good films and this expresses very well the anger and feeling of helplessness that goes with disenfranchisement.
The characters are true to themselves so have to be admired, even if you don't like them...and in some indefinable way, they all "grow" too.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Graham Greene in a different role
Comment: It has been a while since I viewed this movie but I do recall that I found the role of Arthur an interesting turn for Graham Greene. Most of the exposure I had of him to that point was his role in Dances with Wolves, Maverick and his occasional appearance on the Red Green Show as the bumbling explosives "expert". I appreciated seeing him in a role where he isn't portrayed as the nice guy or "Noble Savage" (for lack of a better term). I thought the story was solid enough and I'll admit I was shocked to see Mr. Greene commit the acts of violence (the finger removal scene was unexpected). I think it is a must see for fans of Graham Greene.
Customer Rating:
Summary: To The Point
Comment: This movie was as it states clearcut. The whole basis of this movie is to make aware what is happening every day to our forests and how our fine Government steps all over the first peoples. How money is more important than our very future. If you caught the end you notice that Arthur disappears into the water which leads me to know that he was in fact a spirit of the tree peoples. I loved the movie.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Worth a rental for Greene fans.
Comment: The film is about average in most regards; the plot is somewhat predictable but not painfully so. Greene gives a fair performance, but the film's style is anything but innovative. All in all, this would be worth a rental if you're a Graham Greene fan.
One more thing... Clearcut portrays Red Rock, Ontario as a backwater reservation where people live in squalid conditions. Having lived there for most of my life I must say nothing could be further from the truth. It's an average, sleepy little suburb town the subsistence of which depends on the paper mill in question. The majority of the people there are middle class laborers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Trickster Strikes Again
Comment: I didn't "like" this movie, but I respect it for taking a serious problem (corporate destruction of the environment) and using it to tell a story about one man's love-hate relationship to the problem; he both mourns the lost beauty of nature, and profits from it. Does that remind you of anyone?This is told with great authenticity and integrity to the Native point of view; "Clearcut" is one of the first, best examples of Indian filmmaking, and it's great to see Native attitudes, values, humor, suffering and wisdom depicted after all those decades of Hollywood shoot-'em-ups.
The Indians in this movie are smart, funny, PO'd and in charge. Hee-yah!
Yes, the film is shocking and has some gruesome scenes. Yes, it's sometimes hard to understand; you have to pay close attention, or watch it more than once. The character of Arthur, superbly played by Graham Greene, is a conjuring of the White lawyer's own contradictory impulses; he wants revenge, and Arthur gives it to him, but then the lawyer doesn't like the revenge he's summoned up. The key scene takes place in a sweat lodge; Arthur is a submerged spirit the lawyer sees in a vision, and having once called him up, he cannot keep the tragedy from unfolding, any more than the ancient Greeks could.
Beware of entertaining the Trickster. He's likely to turn around and trick YOU.
Besides the gory scene of the papermill owner being "debarked" (that is, skinned alive), the film's biggest weakness is that it is a melodrama; this is not, as some have said, a character study. Cliches abound here; we learn nothing of the lawyer's history or personality. He's simply a type -- just as the thieving industrialist is. The title of the film works on two levels; not only is the forest clear cut, so is everything else here, the characters, the value systems, the issues. But that makes the story easier to follow. We know whom to root for, the Indians and the trees.
The cinematography is, as advertised, spectacular, but so are the details of the set decoration, especially in the wise old man's shack on the reservation. He's got pipes but no running water, despite the "improvements" the government promised when it appropriated his land and settled him on the res.
I was privileged to watch this movie with a two-spirited Apache who draws great strength from this film. On the day I wrote this, "Clearcut" was Amazon's #6 bestseller in a town in the Canadian Northwest; that says something important. If the Whites don't always get it, the Natives seem to. Maybe the most important message here is that Graham Greene's become a bona fide star in the world's most glamourous medium, decades after Hollywood told us the Indians were all justly annihilated. I guess the Trickster bites Hollywood, too.++
