All articles by Brent Simon – Page 13
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Reviews
Transformers
Dir: Michael Bay. US. 2007. 142mins.Director Michael Bay delivers another stylishly shot, escapist movie gumball with Transformers, an orgiastic action extravaganza based on Hasbro's line of convertible kids' action toys. Some likeable characters and early, intriguingly seeded plot strands of clandestine overlap are sacrificed at the altar of expediency and ...
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Reviews
Mr Brooks
Dir: Bruce A. Evans. US. 2007. 117mins.A lurching, zigzag tale of serial murder, killer apprenticeship, malevolent reverence and cat-and-mouse investigation, Kevin Costner's Mr Brooks puts a deliciously warped spin on what are by now many prim and proper thriller conventions. A throwback to a certain breed of wildly plot-driven thrillers ...
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Reviews
The Invisible
Dir: David Goyer. US. 2007. 102mins. Caught in a state of bodily limbo, a teenager must try to unravel his own death in The Invisible, an evocatively gloomy, elliptical drama of redemption that captures the palpable disconnection of youth. Much more a character-rooted, sustained mood piece than a commercially geared ...
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Reviews
Grindhouse
Dirs: Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino. US. 2007. 192mins. Intended as an enthusiastically grimy, collagist tribute piece to low-budget, ultra-violent and offbeat exploitation flicks of yore, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse delivers an uneven mixture of patchwork, sugar-rush thrills.Consisting of two discrete features strung together by a series of fake trailers ...
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Reviews
Reign Over Me
Dir/scr: Mike Binder. US. 2007. 125 minutes. Using the events of September 11 as a prism through which to refract one widower's swallowed anguish, writer-director Mike Binder's Reign Over Me is an astute, adult drama that grapples with issues of intervention and familial communication, and asks what is the socially ...
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Reviews
Premonition
Dir: Mennan Yapo. US. 2007. 97mins. Unconvincingly folding together domestic drama with time-bending suspense and personal-stakes analytical thrills, Premonition represents Sandra Bullock's worst starring vehicle in a decade. Spare in design, detail and cogent thought, the film is a mock investigative thriller which unfolds over the course of one jumbled ...
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Reviews
Zodiac
Dir: David Fincher. US. 2007. 158mins. In the shadows of this year's Oscar ceremony comes the first legitimate contender for next year's honours in the form of David Fincher's Zodiac, a dense but hypnotic and starkly involving account of the unsolved murders in California that spanned the late 1960s and ...
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Reviews
The Number 23
Dir: Joel Schumacher. US. 2007. 94mins. Jim Carrey continues his beseeching petition of dramatic film fans with The Number 23, a stylish if somewhat murky thriller about one man's downward descent into geometric fixation and madness. The film intriguingly flits around the edges of loopy susceptibility that go hand in ...
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Reviews
Happily N'Ever After
Dir: Paul J. Bolger. US-Ger. 2006. 87mins.The animated subversion of fairytale conventions kick-started by Shrek continues in Happily N'Ever After, a thinly imagined, satirical retelling of the classic story of Cinderella that runs aground on the shoals of cheekiness courtesy mainly of an awkwardly forced irreverence.A wide release and some ...
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Reviews
Freedom Writers
Dir/scr: Richard LaGravenese. US. 2006. 122 minutes.Set against a backdrop of interracial, mutually destructive gang warfare, Freedom Writers is a passionately pitched if decidedly formulaic story of idealistic uplift, inspired by a true story in which Long Beach teenagers put their angst to paper in the charged years following the ...
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Reviews
Rocky Balboa
Dir/scr: SylvesterStallone. US. 2006. 100mins.Sixteen years since the last installment,multi-hyphenate Sylvester Stallone delivers RockyBalboa, a stirring and pleasingly grounded tale of an erstwhileunderdog-turned-champion coming to terms with his ownageing. The most emotionally resonant film in the iconic series since theOscar-winning 1976 original, it also showcases by far Stallone'sbest performance in ...
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Reviews
Letters From Iwo Jima
Dir: Clint Eastwood. US.2006. 141mins.Clint Eastwood's twilight career renaissancecontinues and only further deepens with LettersFrom Iwo Jima,his second film in two months about the best known Pacific battle duringWorld War Two. Shot back-to-back with its companion piece Flags Of Our Fathers, it focuses more explicitly on the conflictand its human ...
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Reviews
Turistas (aka Paradise Lost)
Dir: John Stockwell. US. 2006. 89mins.Set in a remote Brazilian beach town and effectivelyplaying to a traveler's worst nightmares, Turistas details the grittymisfortunes that befall a marooned group of young adventurers. A tangledcombination of thriller elements, travelogue and streamlined bits of gruesomeimperilment, it successfully wrings some novel tension from its ...
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Reviews
The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause
Dir: Michael Lembeck. US. 2006. 91mins.Straight-up, wholeheartedly earnest family films thatare not animated nor revolve around some form of animal are few and far between' and of this subset, many are driven only by primary colors and robust sounddesign. But The SantaClause 3: The Escape Clause, the third film in ...
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Reviews
Flags Of Our Fathers
Dir: Clint Eastwood. US.2006. 131mins.Rarely do words as stark as "heroism" get parsed infilm-making - but that's just what Clint Eastwood's World War II feature Flags Of OurFathers does. A diffuse and demanding picture that, as with most Eastwoodfilms, takes a while to find its stride, it should nevertheless see ...
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Reviews
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
Dir: Jonathan Liebesman.USA. 2006. 89 minutes.A lot of modern horrorhas become more synonymous with horrifying rather than terrifying - thechief difference being the latter is something that grips you on a base,visceral level certainly, but also provokes significant feelings ofpsychological unease. The gulf between these two approaches is roundly apparentin ...
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Reviews
The Guardian
Dir: Andrew Davis. US. 2006.139mins.A square-jawed, water-set tale of tutelage andtrumped personal adversity that takes place against the backdrop of a varietyof rescues in dangerously stormy weather, Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher's TheGuardian is a sincere and capably executed film, if ultimately also adispensable one.Despite copious exclamationsof "hoo-rah!" and the ...
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Reviews
Flyboys
Dir: Tony Bill. US. 2006.138mins.Impressively staged and expansive in scope, World WarOne aviation feature Flyboys isrooted in the true story of those young American men who volunteered as fighterpilots for the French prior to their country's entry into the war. It alsosuccessfully captures how aeroplanes, these newinventions of the sky, ...