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Latest reviews – Page 360
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Reviews
Elegy
Dir: Isabel Coixet. US. 2008. 108 mins.After a couple of near misses, Isabel Coixet finally learns that less is more with Elegy. Her latest feature is an impressively-controlled melodrama that strips back Philip Roth's unsentimental 2001 novel of ageing male desire, The Dying Animal, and repackages it as a straight ...
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Reviews
Fireflies In The Garden
Dir. Dennis Lee. US. 2008. 98 minutes.Some fine performances are compromised by a confusing script in first-time director/screenwriter Dennis Lee's often-involving family melodrama, Fireflies In The Garden. So much of the film is so delicately accomplished, and sports such evident star power as Julia Roberts and Willem Dafoe, that it's ...
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Reviews
The Feelings Factory (La Fabrique Des Sentiments)
Dir. Jean-Marc Moutout. France/ Belgium.2008, 104 minutes. Jean-Marc Moutout's The Feelings Factory (La Fabrique des sentiments) wants to be about life and love and all manner of profound things, but ends up as little more than a jumble of endless close-up reaction shots of French actress Elsa Zylberstein. Unfortunately, this ...
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Reviews
The Aquarium (Genenet Al Asmak)
Dir. Yousry Nasrallah. Egypt/ France/ Germany, 2007. 111 mins.As undoubtedly the best-known protege of t legendary Egyptian director Youssef Chahine, Yousry Nasrallah has been working as a film critic or film-maker for nearly 30 years. Since 1988, hhee has directed a series of distinctive films that frequently show up in ...
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Reviews
Guilty (Coupable)
Dir: Laetitia Masson. France , 2007. 107 mins.There is no better way to kill off a thriller than to leave the audience completely indifferent to its characters. In Guilty (Coupable), Laetitia Masson has written herself all the elements of a classic noir: a murder, two suspects, a plain-clothes policeman and ...
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Reviews
Just Anybody (Le Premier Venu)
Dir/Scr: Jacques Doillon. Fr/Belg 2008. 122mins.French director Jacques Doillon's first feature in five years, Just Anybody (Le Premier Venu), is a supple and intelligent work that exerts a strange and fascinating pull. The movie consistently darts and moves toward the unexpected and unveils depths of characterisation and subtlety of action ...
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Reviews
Julia
Dir: Erick Zonca. France , 2008. 138 mins.Overlong, overblown and underscripted, Erick Zonca's first theatrical feature in 10 years hangs together by a single thread: Tilda Swinton's breathless performance as an in-denial alcoholic who finds herself implicated, out of sheer drunken gullibility, in the kidnapping of a child for ransom.But ...
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Reviews
Gardens Of The Night
Dir. Damian Harris, US/UK, 2007, 110 minutes.Gardens Of The Night begins as 17-year-old Leslie (Gillian Jacobs) enters a homeless shelter in San Diego, and then flashes back to her kidnapping a decade earlier by two men who force her into prostitution.Damian Harris's grim tale dramatises a case history from a ...
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Reviews
Lake Tahoe
Dir: Fernando Eimbcke. Mexico. 2008. 81 mins .At first, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's second film appears to be another droll, quirky movie about teenagers which remind us that sometimes, when nothing happens, everything happens. Rather like his debut, Duck Season, which garnered festival action, critical plaudits and theatrical release in ...
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Reviews
Lake Tahoe
Dir: Fernando Eimbcke. Mexico. 2008. 81 mins .At first, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's second film appears to be another droll, quirky movie about teenagers which remind us that sometimes, when nothing happens, everything happens. Rather like his debut, Duck Season, which garnered festival action, critical plaudits and theatrical release in ...
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ReviewsBlack Ice (Musta Jaa)
Dir: Petri Kotwica. Finland/Germany. 2008. 100 mins.Petri Kotwica’s darkly inventive second film,Black Ice, tries to be at one and the same time a Hitchcockian thriller, a horror version of a Feydeau farce, and an intense marriage drama of love, betrayal and jealousy in the tradition of ...
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Reviews
The Black Balloon (2007)
Dir: Elissa Down Aust. 2007, 97 minsThe Black Balloon is notable for its graphic, not-for-the-squeamish depiction of adult autism. But, more importantly for its box office potential, the youth-oriented movie introduces a glowing young Australian actress with true star potential - the international model Gemma Ward. Plus there's a showy ...
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Reviews
Lemon Tree
Dir: Eran Riklis. Israel/Germany/France, 2008. 106 minsIn Lemon Tree, director Eran Riklis once again looks at the Arab-Israeli conflict from a human perspective, showing how, in a climate of suspicion and mistrust, politics can crush all who get in the way. Penned by his Syrian Bride collaborator Suha Arraf, this ...
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Reviews
In Love We Trust (Zuo You)
Dir: Wang Xiaoshuai. China, 2008. 115 mins.With In Love We Trust, Sixth Generation director Wang Xiaoshuai presents what can only be described as natural tearjerker material - leukaemia, divorce, infidelity - in the milieu of the Chinese middle class and delivers an uneven picture which attempts the impossible and fails ...
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Reviews
CSNY: Deja Vu
Dir: Bernard Shakey. US. 2008. 97 mins.'The huddled sixtysomethings look like they're comparing prescriptions on stage' wrote one uncharitable US music critic of Crosby , Stills, Nash and Young's 2006 'Freedom of Speech' tour, which stirred controversy with its outspoken anti-Iraq-war stance. Unless you're a diehard ...
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Reviews
Mermaid
Dir: Anna Melikyan. Russia, 2007. 118 mins.Azerbaijani director Anna Melkian's second feature opens Berlin' Panorama section with a World Cinema Director's award from Sundance and solid box office at home in Russia under its belt (her first, Mars, was also shown in Panorama at Berlin).A coming-of-age fairytale with dark undertones, ...
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Reviews
The Hottie And The Nottie
Dir: Tom Putnam. US. 2008. 98 mins.A crude twist on the old maxim about inner beauty trumping outward appearance, The Hottie And The Nottie sluggishly tries to copy the Farrelly brothers' winning mixture of sweetness and occasionally revolting humour, but the results couldn't be more unsightly. Socialite and tabloid ...
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Reviews
Quiet Chaos (Caos Calmo)
Dir: Antonello Grimaldi. Italy. 2008. 110 mins.'Write about what you know' goes the old dictum - so contemporary Italian scripters mostly write about city-dwelling, media-savvy middle-class people like themselves. But at least in Quiet Chaos our hero, TV executive Pietro Paladini, is doing something more original than having a mid-life ...
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Reviews
Shine A Light
Dir: Martin Scorsese. US. 2008. 123 mins.Raunchy and affectionate, Scorsese's Rolling Stones film, which opened this year's Berlinale, is as much homage as concert film. In bringing the miracle of the Stones' survival to a wider audience, it's the cinematic equivalent of an all-singing, all-dancing Tutankhamun exhibition. And for all ...