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Latest reviews – Page 355
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Reviews
The Guard Post
Dir. Kong Su-chang. South Korea . 2008. 122 mins.Like Park Chan-wook's Joint Security Area (2000), The Guard Post is set on the edge of the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas. Also like JSA, it uses an investigation into an incident involving a group of army recruits as an ...
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Reviews
L: Change The World
Dir: Hideo Nakata. Japan . 2008. 130 mins.A strong whiff of the well-milked cash cow hangs around this pedestrian follow-up to the hugely popular Death Note films - live-action versions of Takeshi Obata's bestselling manga. Though Goths the world over will rejoice at the top billing given here to cool, ...
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Reviews
An Empress And The Warriors
Dir. Tony Ching. Hong Kong/China. 2008. 93 mins.Celebrated action choreographer Tony Ching's latest and most ambitious directorial outing is a case study in the dangers of setting out deliberately to make a martial arts epic with wide territorial outreach and broad audience appeal. A light yarn about a female ruler's ...
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Reviews
Made Of Honour
Dir: Paul Weiland . US. 2008. 101 mins.Just as its charming main character's plan to ruin his female best friend's wedding only succeeds in bringing himself down as well,sodoes Made Of Honor start off with a breezy likeability before sabotaging itself with generic, unsatisfying plotting. Despite appealing performances from Patrick ...
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Reviews
Bitter & Twisted
Dir. Christopher Weekes. 2008. Australia . 88 mins.It's a miracle when an untracked English-language film arrives on the scene - and a special joy when said movie is smashing. The 28-year-old Weekes and some of his friends made Bitter & Twisted themselves for around $200,000. With no institutional support, they ...
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Reviews
Finding Amanda
Dir/scr. Peter Tolan, US, 2008, 100 minutesIn Finding Amanda , a compulsive gambler who is also a recovering drunk sets out for Las Vegas to find his hooker niece and take her to rehab in Malibu . It's a comedy suicide mission, a Saving Prostitute Ryan which offers up some ...
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Reviews
The Caller
Dir. Richard Ledes, 2008, US, minutes.The Caller is an unusual hybrid, a thriller about corporate corruption that is also a Holocaust memoir. A man facing the certainty of murder looks back sixty years to his survival of the Nazi occupation of France. But the result is also a hybrid, a ...
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Reviews
From Within
Dir. Phedon Papamichael. 2008. USA . 90mins.Although he is a well-regarded cinematographer (Sideways, I Walk The Line), Phedon Papamichael's third foray into directing is little more than another hackneyed horror film. The visuals are assured, but Keene 's screenplay relentlessly piles on the cliches. Without recognizable stars and indistinguishable from ...
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Reviews
Lake City
Dirs. Perry Moore/Hunter Hill, 2008, US, 92 minutes .Lake City sets its earnest prodigal son story in a small southern town. When black sheep Billy (Garity) comes home with a young boy to his mother, Maggie (Spacek), a violent drug war follows him. Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe may have written ...
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Reviews
Trucker
Dir/scr. James Mottern, US, 2008, 90 minutesThe trucker in Trucker is a woman: Diane Ford (Monaghan). forced to take in her young son when her ex-husband Len (Bratt) is stricken with cancer. The 11-year-old whom she hasn't seen since he was a baby proves harder to handle than the 18-wheeler ...
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Reviews
Tennessee
Dir: Aaron Woodley. USA . 2008. 95mins.Those expecting Tennessee to be a Mariah Carey vanity vehicle are in for a letdown. What is most impressive about the film is Carey's brave, understated, deglamorised performance as an ensemble player rather than star. Yes, the film does come on the heels of ...
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Reviews
Bart Got A Room
Dir: Brian Hecker. 2008. USA. 80mins.Bart Got A Room falls in that painful neurotic sphere that connects the vulgarities of lower-middle-class Jewish family life in Tamara Jenkins's The Slums of Beverly Hills, the Floridian sterility and kooky dysfunction of Little Miss Sunshine, and the unfocused, ever-horny worldview of Philip Roth's ...
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Reviews
Love Pain And Vice Versa (Sexo, Dolor Y Vice Versa)
Dir. Alfonso Pineda-Ulloa, Mexico, 2008, 86 minutesAlfonso Pineda-Ulloa's thriller is a stylish feature debut that infuses Alfred Hitchcock's influence into every frame of a story about mutual obsession. Love, Pain & Vice Versa may not rock the box office - although it seems to have potential for modest success - ...
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Reviews
Paraiso Travel
Dir. Simon Brand, Colombia, 2008, 116 minutes.Paraiso Travel takes on the much-travelled (and, recently, much-filmed) journey from Colombia to the dubious paradise of New York where immigrants perform gruelling jobs and live in squalid illegal dwellings. Other films have trod this path with far more drama and imagination.Director Simon Brand's ...
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Reviews
Newcastle
Dir/scr: Dan Castle. Australia. 2008. 106 mins.Dan Castle is an American-born director, but he recognises the dichotomies of Australia, where he makes films. The best thing about Newcastle, a feature set in the country's third largest city, is its awareness of how an industrial landscape (coal and shipping) can coexist ...
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Reviews
I Am Because We Are
Dir: Nathan Rissman. USA. 2008. 85 mins.On just about every level, Los Angeles and landlocked Malawi, the second poorest nation on earth, would appear to exist in universes not so much parallel as perpendicular. Yet in I Am Because We Are, the Madonna production chiefly about the plight of Malawian ...
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Reviews
Redbelt
Dir: David Mamet . US. 2008. 99mins.Clearly a David Mamet film from its first line of dialogue, Redbelt exhibits many of the tenets of the playwright-film-maker's earlier efforts, although they find a novel new setting in the world of mixed martial arts. Some of Mamet's techniques have certainly lost their ...
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Reviews
Deception
Dir: Marcel Langenegger. US. 2008. 107 mins.The spirit of Joe Eszterhas and Adrian Lyne is revived to disappointing results in Deception, a slick, cat-and-mouse thriller that unfolds with sharply-diminishing plausibility. Polished production values and star names will have a limited effect in trying to counteract the old-hat nature of the ...
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Reviews
The Objective
Dir: Daniel Myrick. 2008. USA. 90 mins.Daniel Myrick co-directed the indie commercial sensation The Blair Witch Project with Eduardo Sanchez in 1999. It's nearly a quantum leap from three student campers lost in rural Maryland in 1994 to a gaggle of U.S. Special Ops in an arid, remote section of ...