All articles by Emanuel Levy – Page 3
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Reviews
The Royal Tenenbaums
Dir Wes Anderson. US 2001. 108mins.The same distinctive sensibility that informed Wes Anderson's first two innovative films, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, is very much in evidence in his new serio-comedy, The Royal Tenenbaums, except that the scope is more ambitious, the budget bigger and the cast more glamorous. With ...
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Reviews
Shallow Hal
Dirs: Bobby and Peter Farrelly. US 2001. 113mins.Bobby and Peter Farrelly, masters of the outrageous and gross-out comedy (Dumb And Dumber, There's Something About Mary) take an artistic step backwards with Shallow Hal, a soft, disappointingly sentimental comedy about the true nature of beauty, or the gap between physical surfaces ...
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Reviews
Gosford Park
Dir Robert Altman. UK-US 2001. 138mins.Content and style converge smoothly and brilliantly in Robert Altman's Gosford Park, a luxuriant period drama that applies the Agatha Christie murder mystery format to a rigorous analysis of English society during the early 1930s. This terrifically accomplished film, easily Altman's best work ...
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Reviews
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone
Dir: Chris Columbus. UK-US 2001. 152mins.JK Rowling's Harry Potter books have become such a global literary and cultural phenomena (over 100 million copies sold in more than 46 languages) that it's almost impossible to treat the franchise's first film without disregarding the juggernaut hype that has touted it as the ...
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Reviews
K-PAX
Dir Iain Softley. US 2001. 118minsLawrence Gordon, the producer of K-Pax, would like to believe that his new film is in the spiritual-magical vein of Field Of Dreams (1989), a far superior baseball story about faith and redemption, which he also produced. However, judging by the minor melodrama that unfolds ...
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Reviews
Dinner Rush
Dir Bob Giraldi. US 2001. 94 mins.There is a lot of fun to be had in Bob Giraldi's Dinner Rush, an unpretentious, quintessentially New York independent film that recalls the kind of offbeat, low-budget pictures made in the 1970s and early 1980s, before independent cinema became a forceful movement or ...
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Reviews
My Voyage To Italy (Il Mio Viaggio In Italia)
Dir Martin Scorsese. Italy-US 1999. 246 min.No history book about Italian cinema (and there have been several quite good ones) can accomplish what Martin Scorsese does in this four-hour documentary. For My Voyage To Italy brings the extraordinarily rich tradition of this national cinema to life by placing it in ...
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Reviews
The Last Castle
Dir Rod Lurie. US 2001. 130 mins.The big mystery of prison action film The Last Castle is not how Robert Redford was cast in the lead - he received $11 million, his highest pay cheque to date - but how director Rod Lurie got such low-key and unimpressive performances ...
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Reviews
Riding In Cars With Boys
Dir Penny Marshall. US 2001. 132 min.What begins as fun, nostalgic highschool comedy quickly escalates into a relentlessly dreary melodrama in Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars With Boys, a two-decade chronicle of a woman who got pregnant at adolescence and found herself stuck with an undesirable marriage and ...
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Reviews
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
Dir Jill Sprecher. US 2001. 102 mins.Poignant, touching, and in moments unabashedly philosophical, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, Jill Sprecher's sophomore effort, very much fulfils the promise she showed in her 1997 Sundance-premiered debut, Clockwatchers. Interweaving five contemporary stories into a single narrative, the film deals with the profound, often ...
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Reviews
Bandits
Dir Barry Levinson. US 2001. 122 min.Following his minor, disappointing comedy, An Everlasting Piece (which DreamWork barely released last year), Barry Levinson is back on terra firma with the crime comedy Bandits, a hybrid of a movie that blends to almost satisfying results the norms of classic screwball comedy ...
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Reviews
The Navigators
Dir Ken Loach. UK-Germany-Spain-Italian-French. 95 mins.Propagating the cause of the working class, Ken Loach's politics are in the right place - but that doesn't necessarily result in powerful film-making, as is evident from The Navigators, his latest foray into left-of-centre ideology, which this time examines the privatisation of the British ...
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Reviews
Dog Days (Hundstage)
Dir Ulrich Seidl. Austria 2001. 120 min. Dog Days, Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's astonishing feature directorial debut, is a dark, probing, truly disturbing exploration of angst, anomie, and alienation, as they manifest themselves in Vienna's upscale suburbs. Easily the most provocative movie in this year's Venice ...
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Reviews
Zoolander
Dir Ben Stiller. US 2001. 90 min.Profoundly silly but sporadically entertaining, Ben Stiller's Zoolander is an extremely slight and goofy farce of the fashion industry, this time around targeting male rather than female models. Based on the character that Stiller and MTV Movie Awards writer/producer Drake Sather created for the ...
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Reviews
Don't Say A Word
Dir: Gary Fleder. US. 2001. 111mins.As generic as its title suggests, Don't Say A Word is a routine psychological thriller, elevated by Michael Douglas' strong presence and expert acting as an eminent yuppie shrink whose eight-year-old daughter is kidnapped by a British villain. Lacking in-depth characterisation or any feeling for ...
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Reviews
Serendipity
Dir Peter Chelsom. US 2001. 89 mins.Despite a schematic structure and overdose of contrivances, romantic comedy Serendipity represents a step in the right direction for director Peter Chelsom after his disastrous experience with New Line's Town & Country. Recalling Sleepless In Seattle, and other comedies and dramas ...
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Reviews
Life As A House
Dir Irwin Winkler. US 2001. 123 mins.Although New Line is releasing Life As A House in late October, in its theme and message it's the perfect Christmas film, a sort of a contemporary It's A Wonderful Life, and not solely due to the fact that, like the Jimmy Stewart's hero ...
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Reviews
From Hell
Dir Allan and Albert Hughes. US 2001. 120 mins.Neither chillingly hair-raising as a horror film, nor convincing as an intense psychological spin, Albert and Allan Hughes's From Hell is a rather conventional gothic yarn about Jack The Ripper, history's first, still most notorious serial killer, who terrorised the streets of ...
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Reviews
Training Day
Dir: Antoine Fuqua. US. 2001. 123min. The essential narrative of Training Day, Antoine Fuqua's gritty, highly-intense crime policier, is quite familiar from other genre films, but there's no doubt that it's his most satisfying and technically accomplished picture to date. Cast as a corrupt cop for the first time in ...