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Latest reviews – Page 378
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Reviews
The Last Mistress (Une Vieille Maitresse)
Dir: Catherine Breillat. Fr-It. 2007. 114minsSeasoned provocatrice Catherine Breillat puts a predictably louche spin on the costume drama genre in An Old Mistress, her adaptation of an 1851 novel by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Well known for her sexually explicit and intellectually confrontational dramas such as Romance and Anatomy Of Hell, ...
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Reviews
Promise Me This (Promets-moi)
Dir: Emir Kusturica. Fr-Serb. 2007. 140mins'Never knowingly understated' continues to be the motto of Serbian madcap director Emir Kusturica. All the usual ingredients are present in Promise Me This, the latest knockabout episode of Emir's Balkan Follies - manic overacting, slapstick, wildly cartoonish characters and the usual menagerie of hapless ...
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Reviews
Ocean's Thirteen
Dir: Steven Soderbergh. US. 2007. 122mins.Thirteen should produce some lucky numbers for Warner Brothers and maintain the muscular box-office momentum in the current summer of threequels. The third entry in the crime caper franchise, Ocean's Thirteen marks a return to form after the self-indulgent tomfoolery of its globe-hopping predecessor, even ...
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Reviews
Alexandra (Vishnevskaya)
Dir: Alexander Sokurov. Russia, 2007. 92 minutes.This new effort by Russian auteur Sokurov, an anti-war minimalist 'situation' - calling it a 'tale' would imply more attention to narrative than the film warrants - set and actually shot in the ruins of Grozny, in Chechnya, is very much in the humanist-formalist ...
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Reviews
The Mourning Forest (Mogari no Mori)
Dir: Naomi Kawase. Japan/France 2007. 98 mins.Naomi Kawase is one of those directors who usethe medium of film to work through their obssessions. In her case,these include fractured families, the aftermath of a loved one's deathor disappearance, rural Japanese traditions, the spiritual luminosityof the elderly and infirm. Luckily for audiences ...
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Reviews
Days Of Darkness
Dir. Denys Arcand.Can-Fr. 2007. 115mins.Also called at various stages Age Of Ignorance, Denys Arcand's new movie could also be called The Decline Of The Canadian Empire or alternately The Decline Of The Canadian Male.And Michael Moore should be made to sit through it for as many times as it will ...
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Reviews
California Dreamin' (Nesfarsit)
Dir. Cristian Nemescu. Romania, 2007. 155 min. Awarded the Un Certain Regard prize more for its intentions than the actual outcome, this unfinished picture by talented young Romanian director Nemescu, as shown in Cannes, is the rough cut of a film that might have looked entirely different once completed. ...
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Reviews
Magicians
Dir: Andrew O'Connor. UK-US. 2007. 90mins.These are boom times for British TV comedy. There is a wealth of talent working on the small screen. The continuing paradox is that so few of the best British comedians (Sasha Baron Cohen notwithstanding) make a successful transition to cinema. Magicians, made by the ...
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Reviews
The Pope's Toilet (El Bano del Papa)
Dir/scr: Enrique Fernandez, Cesar Charlone. Urug/Bra. 2007. 97 mins.Taking place in a poverty-stricken area between Brazil and Uruguay and shot on location with documentary-style grittiness, it is the kind of stuff that festivals concerned with social issues and the Third World should have a look at and Latin American minorities ...
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Reviews
Mister Lonely
Dir: Harmony Korine. UK/Fr/Ire/USA. 2006. 112 mins It's a playful, romantic Harmony Kormine who emerges for inspection with Mister Lonely, his first film as a director since Julien Donkey Boy in 1999. The story of a lonely Michael Jackson impersonator who finds a fleeting tenderness with a Marilyn Monroe impersonator ...
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Reviews
The Edge Of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Seite)
Dir/scr: Fatih Akin. Ger/Tur. 2007. 122 mins. Though it's far below the level of his debut film, Head-On, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2003, Fatih Akin's new film, once it comes together at the end and finally defeats the shagginess of his script, is a solid if ...
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Reviews
Back To Normandy (Retour A Normandie)
Dir: Nicolas Philibert. Fr. 2006. 113 mins Any documentary is an act of remembrance. Back To Normandy has a special personal significance for director Nicolas Philibert because it allows him to return to the scene of his earliest filmmaking experiences and also to pay homage to his mentor Rene Allio. ...
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Reviews
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
Dir: Gore Verbinski. US. 2007. 167mins.Disney's Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy coasts to its conclusion with At World's End, a third instalment that adds nothing very exciting to the franchise's formula but spins out the familiar elements with just about enough energy and inventiveness to warrant an almost three-hour running ...
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Reviews
Go Go Tales
Dir/scr: Abel Ferrara. It/US. 2007. 96 mins Abel Ferrara , king of New York low-life drama, slips into more benign mode than usual with Go Go Tales, a good-natured but somewhat half-baked evocation of life backstage at a lap dancing club. The ensemble comedy, with its decided stylistic debt to ...
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Reviews
Chop Shop
Dir: Ramin Bahrani. US. 2007. 84 mins A flawlessly observed piece of street realism, and an unforgiving parable of American economic reality, Chop Shop is a compelling follow-up to Man Push Cart, Ramin Bahrani's 2005 debut. Using a non-professional cast to convincingly natural effect, the film follows in the tradition ...
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Reviews
Deficit
Dir: Gael Garcia Bernal. Mex. 2007. 75 minutes. If sincere commitment and high spirits were enough, this first film by the supremely accomplished - even though still quite young - Mexican actor and heartthrob, Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Motorcycle Diaries, Bad Education) would be a masterpiece. Alas, ...
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Reviews
Counterparts (Gegenueber)
Dir: Jan Bonny. Ger. 2007. 96 mins. A study in midlife crisis verging on pathologic hysteria, Jan Bonny's debut may be of some interest to sympathetic psychoanalysts dealing in Freudian hang-ups but won't go far with audiences at large, who are bound to lose their patience with the two leading ...
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Reviews
Silent Light (Stellet Licht)
Dir: Carlos Reygadas. Mex-Fr-Neth. 2007. 142 mins.Mexican auteurist Carlos Reygadas has lost nothing of the aesthetic austerity so magnificently, if exhaustingly, on display in his first two films, Japon (2002) and Battle In Heaven (2005). Both of those films proved exceptionally demanding on audiences, both narratively and psychologically, but for ...