All articles by Jonathan Romney – Page 38
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Reviews
Waltz In Starlight (Hoshikageno Waltz)
Dir: Shingo Wakagi. Japan. 2007. 97mins.Japanese photographer turned director Shingo Wakagi makes a tender homage to his grandfather in an affecting DV miniature that mixes fictionalized reminiscence with documentary touches. Borderline-experimental, the very personal Waltz In Starlight is essentially gentle portraiture with just a hint of narrative content, the film's ...
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Reviews
My Marlon And Brando (Gitmek)
Dir: Hüseyin Karabey. Turkey/Netherlands/UK. 2008. 92minsA Turkish woman embarks on a romantic journey as war breaks out in Iraq , in the tough, engaging road movie My Marlon And Brando. Billed as being 'based on a true story', the film derives its distinctive immediacy from the fact that its lead ...
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Reviews
Shot In Bombay
Dir: Liz Mermin, UK/US 2007. 99mins.Fact proves racier than fiction in Shot In Bombay, Liz Mermin's documentary on the filming of a Bollywood action movie based on true events. The film in question is Shootout At Lokhandwala, director Apoorva Lakhia's 2007 thriller inspired by a real-life Mumbai gun battle between ...
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Reviews
Eastern Promises
Dir: David Cronenberg US/UK/ Canada , 2007. 96minsA brutal, yet surprisingly tender thriller about Russian gangsters in London, Eastern Promises sees David Cronenberg once again displaying the sign of a true auteur - someone who can take seemingly uncharacteristic material and make it entirely his own. Written by Steve Knight, ...
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Reviews
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les Amours D'Astree et de Celadon)
Dir: Eric Rohmer France /Spain/Italy 2007. 109minsThere are two Eric Rohmers. The more popular is the detached comic observer of modern emotional dilemmas, the maker of the Moral Comedies and Four Seasons series. The other is a sometimes forbidding experimental contriver of historical and literary dramas, such as Perceval le ...
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Reviews
A Girl Cut In Two (La Fille Coupee En Deux)
Dir: Claude Chabrol France 2007. 115 mins tbcIt's cynical business as usual for Claude Chabrol, who offers plentiful style and psychological finesse, if few surprises, in his latest jaundiced and sophisticated entertainment. The story of a young woman caught between two rivalrous and highly unsuitable admirers, A Girl Cut In ...
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Reviews
I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (J'ai Toujours Reve D'etre Un Gangster)
Dir/scr: Samuel Benchetrit . Fr. 2007. 110minsCheerful absurdity, hangdog humour and a sober recognition that, when you come down to it, provincial France just isn't the wild frontier of American crime cinema - all this makes Samuel Benchetrit's downbeat farce a distinctively offbeat pleasure. A set of linked crime vignettes, ...
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Reviews
The Substitute (Vikaren)
Dir: Ole Bornedal. Denmark. 2007. 89minsAll children know that teachers are weird, but what if some of them turned out to be really weird - extra-terrestrially weird' This serviceable premise has yielded entertaining dividends before - notably in Robert Rodriguez's 1998 teen chiller The Faculty - and Danish spoof scarer ...
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Reviews
You, The Living
Dir/scr: Roy Andersson. Swe-Ger-Fr-Den-Nor. 2007. 94minsOne of European cinema's most distinctive stylists, and darkest humourists, returns with another tragi-comic panorama of the human condition in You, the Living. The fourth feature from Sweden's Roy Andersson is remarkably close in tone and style to Songs From the Second Floor, which won ...
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Reviews
Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case (Bunt: Delo Litvinenko)
Dir/scr: Andrei Nekrasov. Ger. 2007. 113mins.A political hot potato dropped into the Cannes official selection at the last moment, Andrei Nekrasov's Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case is likely to spark more news stories than it answers questions.The highly polemical film covers the political context behind the lethal poisoning in London last ...
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Reviews
The Last Mistress (Une Vieille Maitresse)
Dir: Catherine Breillat. Fr-It. 2007. 114minsSeasoned provocatrice Catherine Breillat puts a predictably louche spin on the costume drama genre in An Old Mistress, her adaptation of an 1851 novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Well known for her sexually explicit and intellectually confrontational dramas such as Romance and Anatomy Of Hell, ...
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Reviews
Promise Me This (Promets-moi)
Dir: Emir Kusturica. Fr-Serb. 2007. 140mins'Never knowingly understated' continues to be the motto of Serbian madcap director Emir Kusturica. All the usual ingredients are present in Promise Me This, the latest knockabout episode of Emir's Balkan Follies - manic overacting, slapstick, wildly cartoonish characters and the usual menagerie of hapless ...
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Reviews
Go Go Tales
Dir/scr: Abel Ferrara. It/US. 2007. 96 mins Abel Ferrara , king of New York low-life drama, slips into more benign mode than usual with Go Go Tales, a good-natured but somewhat half-baked evocation of life backstage at a lap dancing club. The ensemble comedy, with its decided stylistic debt to ...
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Reviews
Chop Shop
Dir: Ramin Bahrani. US. 2007. 84 mins A flawlessly observed piece of street realism, and an unforgiving parable of American economic reality, Chop Shop is a compelling follow-up to Man Push Cart, Ramin Bahrani's 2005 debut. Using a non-professional cast to convincingly natural effect, the film follows in the tradition ...
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Reviews
Magnus
Dir/scr: Kadri Kousaar. Est/UK 2007. 86 mins Seamy low life, chic depression and off-the-wall humour make a heady if uneven mixture in the debut feature by Estonia's Kadri Kousaar. Magnus presents a morose, sometimes blackly witty view of life in contemporary Estonia from the point of view of a suicidal ...
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Reviews
The 11th Hour
Dir: Leila Conners Petersen & Nadia Conners. USA . 2007. 91 mins.Leonardo DiCaprio discreetly lends his weight as star and environmental campaigner to The 11th Hour, an unashamedly polemical documentary cum call-to-arms about the current dire state of the ecology - and future prospects for change. The film makes a ...
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Reviews
Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres)
Dir/scr: Celine Sciamma. France 2007. 85 mins Every Cannes festival brings at least one sexually delicate French coming-of-age drama, and while Water Lilies is hardly mould-breaking, it's certainly an affecting and more than competent addition to the genre. Set against the eccentric background of synchronised swimming, Celine Sciamma's debut is ...
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Reviews
Love Songs (Les Chansons d'Amour)
Dir/scr: Christophe Honore Fr. 2007. 95 mins The genre of the realist-inflected arthouse musical has intermittently thrived in France , ever since it was kick-started by Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Papapluies de Cherbourg). It's an institution that ambitious French directors have returned to with regularity, with even ...
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