All articles by Jonathan Romney – Page 37
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ReviewsSanguepazzo
Dir: Marco Tullio Giordana. Italy-France. 2008. 148mins .A grandly-mounted but turgid prestige piece, Wild Blood attempts to give tragic heft to the lives of two of Italian cinema’s more disreputable figures. Writer-director Marco Tullio Giordana won considerable kudos in 2003 with The Best Of Youth, but ...
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Reviews
Voyage To The Pyranees (Le Voyage aux Pyrenees)
Dir/scr. Arnaud & Jean-Marie Larrieu.France. 2008. 102 mins.A marital farce about misunderstandings, the great blue yonder and (apparently supernatural) gender-swapping, Journey To The Pyrenees is brisk, witty and often daft. This love letter to the film-makers’ native region is a gift for its two leads, Sabine Azema and Jean-Pierre Darroussin, ...
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ReviewsI've Loved You So Long... (Il Ya Longtemps Que Je T'aime...)
Dir: Philippe Claudel. France/Germany. 2008. 110 mins.
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Reviews
Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell
Dir: Matt Wolf. US. 2008. 70mins.A long-neglected cult musician gets his well-deserved moment in the limelight in Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, a moving, celebratory documentary that will turn many viewers on to its subject's strange, compelling sounds. Expect neither myth-making nor music-biz scandal from this level-headed, informative ...
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Reviews
Filth and Wisdom
Dir: Madonna. UK. 2008. 81 minsContrary to billing, there's not much filth and precious little wisdom in Madonna's directing debut. Even so, you have to applaud her for daring to get behind a camera, given that her career in front of it has been strewn with clunkers. While Filth And ...
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Reviews
Full Battle Rattle
Dir: Tony Gerber, Jesse Ross. US. 2008. 92 minsAmerican tanks roll under the desert sun, the minaret of a mosque stands out on the horizon, a wounded soldier spurts blood... a scene from the Iraq war, surely' Not quite - the tanks are real, but the mosque isn't, and ...
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Reviews
War Child
Dir: Christian Karim Chrobog. USA . 2007. 94 mins.Most hip-hop artists sell themselves on their school-of-hard-knocks credentials, but few rappers can have known the kind of hell that Sudanese artist Emmanuel Jal has endured - and lived to tell the tale. A universe apart from the ...
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Reviews
Son of a Lion
Dir: Benjamin Gilmour. Australia/Pakistan. 2007. 92mins.Childrens' exposure to gun culture is fast becoming one of the fail-safe themes of world cinema, but we haven't yet seen it in quite the context presented by the inventive Pakistan-set drama Son Of A Lion.Benjamin Gilmour's no-frills DV feature, co-written with collaborators from the ...
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Reviews
The Song Of Sparrows
Dir: Majid Majidi. Iran. 2008. 98 mins.The perennial workingman's blues get a cheerful philosophical spin in The Song Of Sparrows, a briskly likeable comedy from Iranian director Majid Majidi. But while the film will raise plenty of charmed smiles on the festival circuit as enjoyable light relief, its crowd-pleasing style ...
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Reviews
Rail Road Crossing (Pas a nivell)
Dir: Pere Vilà. Spain. 2007. 103 mins.For many viewers, Catalan drama Rail Road Crossing will seem like the watching-paint-dry film par excellence. At first sight, Pere Vilà's debut feature exemplifies the three-act structure of art cinema: nothing happens, nothing happens and still nothing happens. But for viewers prepared to go ...
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Reviews
57000 km Between Us (57000 KM entre nous)
Dir: Delphine Kreuter. France. 2007. 82 mins.Hell is other people - especially family, and especially when they have a camcorder in hand. That's the message of Delphine Kreuter's debut 57 000 KM Between Us, a caustic exercise that uses its rough-edged DV medium to revealing effect, re-tuning French bourgeois comedy ...
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Reviews
The King of Ping Pong (Ping-Pongkingen)
Dir: Jens Jonsson. Sweden. 2007. 107 mins.Growing pains in a cold climate: this formula has reaped handsome dividends for Nordic cinema in the past, most spectacularly for Lasse Hallström's My Life as a Dog, and more modestly for Dagur Kári's Icelandic art-house hit of 2003 Noi Albinoi. Swedish comedy-drama The ...