All Gala Presentations articles – Page 10
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ReviewsOne Week
Dir/Scr: Michael McGowan. Canada. 2008. 94mins.Canadian filmmaker Michael McGowan’s second feature after Saint Ralph, One Week marks another dispiriting example of a director using sickness and physical deterioration in rationalising dishonest and narcissistic behaviour.Coming on the heels of Amy Redford’s Sundance entry The Guitar, One Week ...
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ReviewsThe Loss Of A Teardrop Diamond
Dir. Jodie Markell, US, 2008, 102 minutes.In exhuming Tennessee Williams’s unproduced screenplay from 1980, actress-turned-director Jodie Markell has delivered a respectable 1920’s-set upstairs-downstairs story of a vain heiress (Bryce Dallas Howard) who looks beyond her Memphis surroundings but struggles for the respect of a man below ...
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ReviewsPride And Glory
Dir. Gavin O’Connor. US. 2008 125 min.After sitting on the shelf for the better part of two years, Gavin O’Connor’s bruising Manhattan melodrama charges into a congested festival lineup breathing fire and smoke. A coiling police saga about the clash between family and career loyalties, Pride ...
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ReviewsWho Do You Love
Toronto: Breezily-entertaining, this jazz-fuelled biopic may still face a commercial struggle, says Jan Stuart. Dir. Jerry Zaks. US. 2008. 90 minutesA breezily-entertaining dramatisation of the life of blues entrepreneur Leonard Chess (Nivola), Who Do You Lovewill test the public’s appetite for recording studio soap operas. While ...
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ReviewsFifty Dead Men Walking
Dir. Kari Skogland. UK/Canada. 2008. 118 mins.It was only in the aftermath of the Vietnam War that filmmakers were able to create a substantial body of work reflecting the complexities of what had happened there. The same is proving to be true of the recent ‘Troubles’that ...
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ReviewsA Year Ago In Winter
Dir: Caroline Link. Germany. 2008. 128 mins.Caroline Link’s first film in seven years is an elegantly-woven portrait of a family in crisis after the suicide of an 18 year-old boy and the steps which occur on their way to healing. Never overly gloomy or downbeat, A ...
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ReviewsThe Other Man
Director: Richard Eyre. UK/USA. 2008. 90mins.Richard Eyre is fast becoming the new master of unhealthy obsession. After Judi Dench’s creepily predatory school teacher inNotes On A Scandal, it is now the turn of Liam Neeson to play a fool for love inThe Other Man.Well-heeled literary adaptation ...
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ReviewsDean Spanley (2008)
Dir. Toa Fraser. New Zealand/UK. 2008. 99mins.New Zealand director Toa Fraser’s Dean Spanley overcomes an uncertain and sketchy opening section to register as a moving and visually wondrous evocation of magic and imagination. The movie’s tonal shifts are fairly abrupt and the first third is frustratingly ...
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ReviewsThe Secret Life Of Bees
Dir: Gina Prince-Bythewood. USA. 2008. 110 minsInspirational life lessons abound in The Secret Life Of Bees, a wholesome, heartwarming version of the Sue Monk Kidd bestseller. The mixture of personal heartache and social history is handled with tender loving care, but is so sentimental and sermonising ...
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ReviewsPasschendaele
Dir: Paul Gross. Canada. 2008. 114minsAnyone confronting the horrors of trench warfare in the First World War has to acknowledge the long shadows cast by seminal classics All Quiet On The Western Front and Paths Of Glory. Paul Gross’s ambitious Passchendaele doesn’t try to compete. Instead, ...
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