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Latest reviews – Page 371
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Reviews
Mr Woodcock
Dir: Craig Gillespie US . 2007. 89mins.Former pupils of sadistic PE teachers will be a key audience for Mr Woodcock, an intermittently chuckle-worthy comedy with Billy Bob Thornton as the bullying, track-suited title character. Having reportedly sat on the shelf for a year, with some scenes re-shot, it's unlikely that ...
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Reviews
Cargo 200 (Gruz 200)
Dir: Alexey Balabanov, Russia 2007, 86minsAlexey Balabanov's eleventh feature is one of his bleakest. Set in provincial Russia in 1984 as the USSR enters its death throes, it portrays a society that is sickly, violent and cynical. The title refers to the name given to corpses of Russian soldiers being ...
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Reviews
The Stone Angel
Dir. Kari Skogland Canada , 2007. 115 minutes.The Stone Angel is a perfectly respectable, solidly-made film which, beyond the expert performance by the always reliable Ellen Burstyn, has unfortunately little to recommend it for consideration for theatrical release beyond its home territory. Adapted by director Skogland from a beloved Canadian ...
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Reviews
Don't Think About It (Non Pensarci)
Dir: Gianni Zanasi Italy 2007. 108 mins.The real surprise of the 2007 Venice Days sidebar on the Lido , Don't Think About It is that rarest of things: an exportable Italian comedy that features neither Roberto Benigni nor Nanni Moretti. Directed with an admirable lightness of touch by Gianni Zanasi ...
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Reviews
Run, Fat Boy, Run
Dir: David Schwimmer UK . 2007. 101minsSimon Pegg is fast becoming Britain 's king of comedy. He seems to have found the secret of reaching levels of box-office success denied to fellow British television graduates like Mitchell and Webb (Magicians (2007)) and Ant and Dec (Alien Autopsy (2006)). Run, Fat ...
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Reviews
The Sweet and the Bitter (Il Dolce e l'Amaro)
Dir: Andrea Porporati Italy 2007. 99 mins.The Italian Mafia film comes of age with The Sweet and the Bitter, a Sicilian Goodfellas that offers a refreshingly unheroic, sometimes darkly comic take on the grubby reality behind the rituals and myths of Cosa Nostra. Like another recent title, Stefano Incerti's L'Uomo ...
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Reviews
Exodus
Dir: Penny Woolcock UK 2007. 110 mins.As much community project as feature film, Exodus transplants the Biblical story of Moses and the children of Israel to the depressed British seaside resort of Margate, in a dystopian future where racist politicians hold sway and asylum seekers are fenced inside a refugee ...
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Reviews
The Past (O Passado)
Dir: Hector Babenco Argentina-Brazil 2007. 114 mins.Brazilian director Hector Babenco's latest film is an utterly misbegotten effort, a long way from his earlier successes such as Pixote and Kiss of the Spider Woman, or 2003's Carandiru. Despite the presence of international heart-throb Gael Garcia Bernal, the tortured, sometimes unwittingly laughable ...
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Reviews
Mother of Tears
Dir/Scr: Dario Argento. Italy. 2007 98mins .The new work of Italian horror specialist Dario Argento, Mother of Tears forms a trilogy of the two macabre, hyper stylized works that made his international reputation: Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). The time away from the material has certainly not dulled the director's ...
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Reviews
Continental: A Film Without Guns (Continental: Un Film Sans Fusil)
Dir: Stephane Lafleur Canada 2007. 103 min.From the bold statement of the title to the closing scene that completes a crooked circle, Stephane LaFleur's feature debut is a mordantly funny tour of human despair. You don't need firearms to kill the human spirit, loneliness and a boring job will do ...
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Reviews
Nightwatching
Dir: Peter Greenaway, Netherlands-Canada-Poland-UK. 140mins.Peter Greenaway takes The Night Watch - arguably Rembrandt's most famous painting, and certainly his most earnestly discussed and interpreted work - as the basis for a rambling, theatrical, frequently didactic study of a turning point in the Dutch painter's life. By turns both murder mystery, ...
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Reviews
Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame (Buda As Sharm Foru Rikht)
Dir: Hana Makhmalbaf. Iran / France , 2007. 81 min. Hana Makhmalbaf is the younger scion of the Makhmalbaf Film House factory. All of eighteen years old and already a veteran with a short film, a documentary and a book of poems to her credit, she handles this first feature ...
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Reviews
Jane Austen Book Club
Dir. Robin Swicord, US, 105 minutes, colour, 35 mm. In The Jane Austen Book Club, five women and one man lead lives that seem torn from the pages of Jane Austen's novels as they discuss those writings in a book club in a California suburb. 'What would Jane do' becomes ...
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Reviews
Darfur Now
Dir: Theodore (Ted) Braun. US, 2007, 99 minutes Some may find this documentary on the tragedy currently unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan a bit too slickly produced for its own good, but all in all, it's a solid, exciting, informative, and occasionally moving portrait of that troubled, desperate ...
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Reviews
Chaotic Ana
Dir: Julio Medem. Spain, 2007, 120 minutes. Many viewers felt that director Medem's The Lovers of the Arctic Circle was one of the best films of the 1990s. Its mixture of poetic visual and verbal imagery, coupled with a strong dose of mysticism and steamy insights into love and sex, ...
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Reviews
Lars And The Real Girl
Dir: Craig Gillespie USA 2007. 106 mins.Ryan Gosling, one of the finest actors currently working in American independent cinema, is once again outstanding in this offbeat but exceptionally accomplished film. Starting off as funny and quirky, Lars and the Real Girl gradually becomes a riveting yet never heavy-handed psychological portrait ...
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Reviews
Before The Rains
Dir: Santosh Sivan US/India. 2007. 98minsA bittersweet journey from blinkered loyalty to rueful independence, Before The Rains captures the crumbling of British rule in 1930s India through a doomed love affair and its tragic consequences. In its more obvious moments it strays perilously close to the conventions of romantic fiction ...