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Latest reviews – Page 379
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Reviews
After Him (Apres Lui)
Dir: Gael Morel. Fr. 2007. 90 mins A mother's grief warps into a suffocating obsession in Apres Lui, a sombre study of aching loss and broken hearts. The latest feature from Gael Morel (Le Clan, A Toute Vitesse etc) is a typically dour, unsentimental drama that refuses to sweeten the ...
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ReviewsThe Diving Bell And The Butterfly (Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon)
Dir:Julian Schnabel. 2007.France 112 mins
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Reviews
Death Proof
Dir/scr: Quentin Tarantino. USA 2007. 115 mins. Quentin Tarantino should go back to making films that matter. If the shorter, Grindhouse version of Death Proof, his hybrid slasher meets car chase homage to early 1970s B-movies, hinted that everyone's favourite cult director was running out of creative gas, the full-length ...
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Reviews
Ploy
Dir/scr: Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Thai. 2007. 105 mins. Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang's most mature, measured film to date, Ploy offers a darkly poetic variation on the theme of The Seven Year Itch. Though its slow pacing demands a certain patience, the slow waltz of story, editing and camerawork goes beyond the ...
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Reviews
A Mighty Heart
Dir: Michael Winterbottom. US. 2007. 108 mins Michael Winterbottom has become a master at relating dramatic true stories in a documentary style. He brings a typical intelligence and urgency to A Mighty Heart, the 2002 case of the kidnap and execution of American journalist Daniel Pearl. The star casting of ...
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Reviews
Paranoid Park
Dir/scr: Gus Van Sant. US-Fr. 2007. 85mins.Gus Van Sant is such a consummate filmmaker, so in love with the visual and aural texture of the medium, that it's difficult at first to pinpoint the niggling problem with Paranoid Park, his most experimental feature to date. It's not that Van Sant ...
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Reviews
XXY
Dir: Lucia Puenzo. Arg/Sp/Fr. 2007. 91 mins The familiar agonies of adolescence are given a fresh slant and a perceptive treatment in XXY, a quietly impressive first feature from novelist and documentary maker Lucia Puenzo, daughter of The Official Story (1985) director Luis Puenzo. Refusing to sensationalise the subject of ...
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Reviews
Garage
Dir: Lenny Abrahamson. Ir. 2007. 85 mins.Calling Garage a 'small' film would be true enough, but the Hope diamond, all things considered, is awfully small as well. Both, in any case, are gems. The second feature of director Lenny Abrahamson, following his well-received debut film Adam & Paul, which won ...
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Reviews
Import Export
Dir: Ulrich Seidl. Aust. 2007. 135 mins.Very much in the vein of his best-known film, Dog Days (2001), Austrian auteur and documentarian Ulrich Seidl continues in this, his first fiction film in 6 years, to explore the darker aspects of human existence. His unremittingly depressing view of the human condition ...
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Reviews
All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonnee)
Dir/scr: Mia Hansen-Love. France 2007. 105 mins.Debut director Mia Hansen-Love turns seemingly random slices from the life of a disintegrating family unit into a remarkably graceful, natural film about what it is to be human. Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this hopeful parable of failure is the way casting, ...
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Reviews
Blind Mountain (Mang Shan)
Dir/scr/prod: Li Yang. Ch. 2007. 103 mins. Li Yang demonstrates once again that he is a master of cinematic tension with his second feature, Blind Mountain . Based on the widespread practice of bride trafficking in rural China, this harrowing but limpidly shot story of the abduction and sale of ...
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Reviews
To Each His Own Cinema (Chacun Son Cinema)
Dir: 35 leading directors. Fr. 2007. 120minsConceived as a homage to the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, this improbable congeries and potentially incoherent work of cinema (35 different directors making three-minute shorts about the movie-going experience and their own introduction to the world of film) is surprisingly successful. ...
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Reviews
A Lost Man (Un Homme Perdu)
Dir: Danielle Arbid. Fr. 2007. 97 mins. Somewhere, buried deep down this pseudo-road movie that moves round in circles, there is a burning issue begging to be explored. All the more pity that Danielle Arbid never actually comes to grips with it, though it is pretty obvious the relations between ...
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Reviews
The Milky Way (A Via Lacteal)
Dir: Lina Chamie Brazil 2007. 88 mins. A cross-city drive turns into an existential odyssey in Lina Chamie's The Milky Way, which opened Cannes ' Critics Week sidebar. Part urban road movie, part stream-of-consciousness cinematic monologue, Milky Way layers flashbacks, bon mots about life and death, and variant versions of ...
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Reviews
Magnus
Dir/scr: Kadri Kousaar. Est/UK 2007. 86 mins Seamy low life, chic depression and off-the-wall humour make a heady if uneven mixture in the debut feature by Estonia's Kadri Kousaar. Magnus presents a morose, sometimes blackly witty view of life in contemporary Estonia from the point of view of a suicidal ...
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Reviews
The 11th Hour
Dir: Leila Conners Petersen & Nadia Conners. USA . 2007. 91 mins.Leonardo DiCaprio discreetly lends his weight as star and environmental campaigner to The 11th Hour, an unashamedly polemical documentary cum call-to-arms about the current dire state of the ecology - and future prospects for change. The film makes a ...
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Reviews
Actresses (Actrices)
Dir: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Fr. 2007. 110mins Facing 40 becomes a wake-up call for a neurotic self-absorbed performer in Actresses, the second feature from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Previously entitled Dream Of The Night Before, the film mines autobiographical material to explore the eternal conflict between professional success and personal happiness. ...
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Reviews
Tehilim
Dir: Raphael Nadjari. Fr / Is. 2007. 96 mins. Raphael Nadjari is back, digging again at the 'dialectical dimensions of Judaism' (as he calls it), a labour of love that he has persistently pursued in all his films to date. A quiet, subdued and remarkably controlled drama, fiercely introverted and ...
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Reviews
The Band's Visit (Bikur Hatizmoreth)
Dir/scr: Eran Kolirin. Is/Fr. 2007. 85 mins.This melancholy deadpan comedy accepted in three out of Cannes' four official sections and finally running in Un Certain Regard, is a kind of prestidigitator's tightrope act, almost crashing down several times before triumphantly reaching its goal in one piece.Though nothing much is happening ...
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Reviews
Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres)
Dir/scr: Celine Sciamma. France 2007. 85 mins Every Cannes festival brings at least one sexually delicate French coming-of-age drama, and while Water Lilies is hardly mould-breaking, it's certainly an affecting and more than competent addition to the genre. Set against the eccentric background of synchronised swimming, Celine Sciamma's debut is ...