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Latest reviews – Page 372
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Reviews
Chaos (Heya fawda)
Dir: Youssef Chahine France/Egypt 2007. 122 minsVeteran Egyptian director Youssef Chahine serves up a stirring, old-fashioned melodrama with a liberal conscience in his latest film, co-directed with his younger colleague Khaled Youssef. As imbued with the sounds, colours and passions of Cairo as a novel by Naguib Mahfouz, the film ...
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Reviews
A Jihad For Love
Dir: Parvez Sharma USA/UK/France/Germany/Australia. 2007. 81minsFilmed over six years in twelve countries, A Jihad For Love compiles personal stories that illuminate the bitter struggles of lesbians andgay men to reconcile their homosexuality with their Muslim faith. The film presents itself as a modest first step in attempting to foster a ...
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Reviews
Blood Brothers (Tian Tang Kou)
Dir: Alexi Tan, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2007. 95minsThe closing film at the Venice film festival, Blood Brothers is a dark gangster fable set in 1930s Shanghai - and a stylish but hollow debut for John Woo protege Alexi Tan. For all the film's lush cinematography, spot-on period detail and all-star Asian ...
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Reviews
Battle in Seattle
Director/Scr: Stuart Townsend. US, Canada. 2007. 100minsA labour of love for actor turned director Stuart Townsend, Battle In Seattle is an uneven but ultimately impassioned recreation of the riots at the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle . Documentary footage and fictional drama scenes make for initially uneasy bedfellows ...
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Reviews
12 (Razgnevannyh Muzhchin)
Dir: Nikita Mikhalkov Russia 2007. 158 mins.Russian maestro Nikita Mikhalkov proves that Sidney Lumet's classic jury drama 12 Angry Men can work in another time and another place in this tasty adaptation, which is tough and passionate enough to survive the occasional lapse into Slavic sentimentality. It's hard to believe ...
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Reviews
Across The Universe
Dir: Julie Taymor USA 2007. 129mins.The post-Chicago boom in screen musicals takes a novel twist with Across The Universe, a concept album-style love story set against the social upheavals of the 1960s and largely told through the songs of The Beatles. This ambitious Julie Taymor project veers between the soaring, ...
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Reviews
Brick Lane
Dir: Sarah Gavron UK. 2007. 101 minsMonica Ali's 2003 novel Brick Lane was feted for its ability to blend the personal and the political as it recounted the experiences of a young Bangladeshi woman's journey of self-discovery. It was illuminating about the hidden lives of Britain's Bangladeshi community and the ...
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Reviews
Rendition
Dir:Gavin Hood. US. 2007. 120mins Religious extremism is the evil of our time; creating those willing to die for a cause and those prepared to sacrifice their core values to prevent them. The murky complexities of the war on terror provide a compelling backdrop to Rendition, a smart, provocative ...
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Reviews
Useless (Wu Yong)
Dir. Jia Zhang-Ke. China , 2007. 84mins.Perennial Venice favourite Jia Zhang-Ke is back with a documentary whose title could invite all manner of cheap shots. But it also happens to be the name of a new, and highly successful, Chinese fashion brand. The second part in a trilogy dedicated to ...
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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
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Dir: Shekhar Kapur UK, 2007. 114 minsIt seemed an impossible hope that The Golden Age could match the achievements of its illustrious predecessor. Elizabeth (1998) was a huge international success that earned 7 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and confirmed the radiant star-quality of Cate Blanchett. That's a tough act ...
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Reviews
Captain Mike Across America
Dir: Michael Moore. US. 97 mins.Move over, Meatloaf. Michael Moore is a rock star, or at least he was for a short season, in an autumn 2004 US tour to exhort non-voting young Americans to register and cast ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. Captain Mike Across America ...
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Reviews
Fugitive Pieces
Dir: Jeremy Podeswa. Canada. 108 minsSomewhere in the midst of Fugitive Pieces, a story informed by memories of the Holocaust, a character explains that the amazing aspect of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats. The life lesson is that in all things there is a positive ...
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Reviews
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
Dir: Sidney Lumet, 2007 , US , 123mins.Sidney Lumet is back on familiar territory with this caper gone awry. This time it's a plot by two desperate adult brothers, Andy and Hank (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke), to rob their parents' suburban jewellery store, which ends up killing their ...
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Reviews
Disengagement
Dir. Amos Gitai. France / Israel / Germany / Italy , 2007. 115 mins.Amos Gitai's systematic chronicle of modern Israeli history reaches one of its more sensitive and inevitable points in this dramatised version of the recent crisis generated by the unilateral decision, taken by the Sharon government, to dismantle ...
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Reviews
The Secret Of The Grain (La Graine Et Le Mulet)
Dir/Scr: Abdellatif Kechiche , France , 2007, 153mins.A cine-verite tour-de-force, Abdellatif Kechiche's follow-up to the award- winning L'Esquive loads an apparently slight story set against the background of France 's first-and-second generation Maghrebi immigrant communities with surprising dramatic weight. There's even less story and even more of the director's trademark ...
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Reviews
Margot At The Wedding
Director/Scr: Noah Baumbach US . 2007. 91minsBaumbach's ambitious follow-up to the much admired The Squid And The Whale (2005) has echoes of Rohmer and vintage Woody Allen in its depiction of the affairs of the heart but lacks the laser-like precision, economy and easy approachability of his earlier hit. A ...
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Reviews
The Brave One
Dir: Neil Jordan. US. 2007. 122 mins.Jodie Foster delivers a performance far superior to her material in Neil Jordan's self-consciously provocative and largely absurd vigilante drama - which has its world premiere as a Special Presentation in Toronto. Attempting to hit the same hot buttons as other audacious studio movies ...
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Reviews
The Brothers Solomon
Dir: Bob Odenkirk. US. 2007. 94mins.Coming only three months after another mainstream R-rated comedy revolving around an impending birth, The Brothers Solomon will likely enjoy neither the critical accolades nor the bountiful box-office that greeted the arrival of this summer's Knocked Up. Though not without its screwball charm and occasionally ...