All Gala Presentations articles – Page 11
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ReviewsI, Don Giovanni (Io, Don Giovanni)
Dir. Carlos Saura. Italy / Spain / Austria, 2009. 125 min.
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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 ...