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Latest reviews – Page 377
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Reviews
Captivity
Dir: Roland Joffe. US. 2007. 84 minsThe controversy surrounding the marketing of Captivity proves to be more interesting than the film itself. Banned American billboard images considered too intense for public display earned Captivity the kind of notoriety that publicity budgets cannot buy. Anyone seduced by the whiff of scandal ...
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Reviews
Transformers
Dir: Michael Bay. US. 2007. 142mins.Director Michael Bay delivers another stylishly shot, escapist movie gumball with Transformers, an orgiastic action extravaganza based on Hasbro's line of convertible kids' action toys. Some likeable characters and early, intriguingly seeded plot strands of clandestine overlap are sacrificed at the altar of expediency and ...
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Reviews
1408
Dir: Mikael Hafstrom. US. 2007. 94mins.Pitched as summer counter-programming but arriving in the midst of a glut of underperforming horror releases, 1408 is a spooky Stephen King adaptation given an extra touch of class by leads John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson and Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom.The Dimension Films chiller ...
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Reviews
Evan Almighty
Dir: Tom Shadyac. US. 2007. 96mins.Borrowing liberally from Field Of Dreams in addition to its previous swipes from Oh, God!, Evan Almighty is an ungainly melding of religious paean, big-budget studio comedy, and summer-blockbuster spectacle. Taking over for Bruce Almighty star Jim Carrey, Steve Carell proves to be a difficult ...
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Reviews
Evening
Dir. Lajos Koltai. US. 2007. 117mins.In Evening, director Lajos Koltai makes his English-language feature debut with an earnest adaptation of Susan Minot's successful novel about a dying woman looking back at the love of her youth. With a dream-team cast of actresses - Vanessa Redgrave, Clare Danes, Meryl Streep, Natascha ...
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Reviews
Billy The Kid
Dir. Jennifer Venditti. US. 2007. 85mins.Billy The Kid ventures into a small, contained community to focus on a single life and thereby turns the camera on the world. The Grand Prize winner at SXSW in Austin, where it premiered in March, and an audience favourite at Hot Docs in Toronto, ...
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Reviews
Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer
Dir: Tim Story. US. 2007. 92mins.The sequel to unexpected summer 2005 smash Fantastic Four adds a major new Marvel character to the action and aims for a broader audience with a slightly younger skew than the first film. In essence, though, Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer is the ...
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Reviews
Inside (A l'Interieur)
Dirs: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo. Fr. 2007. 80mins.Imagine a graphic, feature-length riff on that line in Macbeth about Macduff being 'from his mother's womb untimely ripped' and you have the kernel of Inside, a vicious gore-fest, which seems designed to prove that Europeans too can up the horror stakes too ...
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Reviews
Hostel: Part II
Dir: Eli Roth. US. 2007. 94mins. Two significant story changes notwithstanding, Hostel: Part II stays close to the first film's successful strategy of mixing unsuspecting American tourists with sadistic Eastern Europeans. Writer-director Eli Roth tries to enliven the formula by switching the genders of his victims and by offering an ...
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Reviews
Mr Brooks
Dir: Bruce A. Evans. US. 2007. 117mins.A lurching, zigzag tale of serial murder, killer apprenticeship, malevolent reverence and cat-and-mouse investigation, Kevin Costner's Mr Brooks puts a deliciously warped spin on what are by now many prim and proper thriller conventions. A throwback to a certain breed of wildly plot-driven thrillers ...
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Reviews
Romulus, My Father
Dir: Richard Roxburgh. 104mins. Aus. 2007.The directorial debut from Australian actor Richard Roxburgh (Moulin Rouge, Van Helsing), Romulus, My Father boasts strong performances, elegant camerawork and striking early 1960s production design. But it's a tough working-class tale that grows ever more harrowing as it intensifies and, despite the formidable presence ...
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Reviews
Jellyfish (Meduzot)
Dir. Etgar Keret, Shira Geffen. Is-Fr. 2007. 78mins.While it makes for a bleak portrait of dysfunctional families and wretched personal lives, Jellyfish is a surprisingly accessible and easy to watch feature that deservedly won the Critic’s Week prize at Cannes.A promising debut by a tandem whose work has successfully adorned ...
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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
Calle Santa Fe
Dir: Carmen Castillo. Chile-Fr-Bel. 164mins.Beginning as a reconstruction of the October 1977 police shooting of Chilean underground Marxist leader Miguel Enriquez, Calle Santa Fe is a long but ultimately compelling documentary both celebrates the anti-Pinochet resistance and subjects it to testing questions. These are made all the more incisive and ...
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Reviews
We Own The Night
Dir/scr: James Gray. US. 2007. 105mins.A self-conscious evocation of the crime and punishment police thrillers that were once a speciality of Sidney Lumet, We Own The Night is an average B-movie with delusions of grandeur. Transparent plotting and dubious moral grand-standing are the main drawbacks in a film that lacks ...
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Reviews
Secret Sunshine (Miryang)
Dir: Lee Chang-dong. S Kor. 2007. 133mins.An uncompromising experiment in how much suffering a soul can take, both on screen and in one's cinema seat, Lee Chang-dong's follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Oasis makes for an original but ultimately gruelling two-and-a-quarter hours' viewing. This contemporary, twisted parable of Job is impressive, ...