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Latest reviews – Page 383
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Reviews
The Reaping
Dir: Stephen Hopkins. US. 2007. 99mins. After a recent sojourn working in television and cable, action director Stephen Hopkins pulls out all the stops with The Reaping. The result is a frenzied and unrestrained supernatural horror thriller, starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank as a debunker of religious phenomena enlisted ...
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Reviews
As You Like It
Dir: Kenneth Branagh UK-US. 2006. 127mins. Kenneth Branagh's fifth Shakespeare adaptation (after Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost), As You Like It is a curiously undercharged affair. Handsomely and fluidly shot and intelligently performed, it nonetheless lacks spark. What should be a playful and magical ...
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Reviews
Borderland
Dir: Zev Berman. US. 2007. 104mins. A solidly professional exercise in the horror/thriller genre, Borderland will not disappoint those that like their suspense and gore laid on in equal measure, and nice and thick. Still, it doesn't rise significantly above other examples of the genre, and a commercial release in ...
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Reviews
Mr Bean's Holiday
Dir: Steve Bendelack. UK-US. 2007. 85mins If Rocky Balboa and John McClane can hit the comeback trail after a lengthy absence then who would deny a similar opportunity to Rowan Atkinson's one man disaster area' Ten years have passed since Bean but the public's affection for the gurning, bug-eyed loon ...
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Reviews
The Hills Have Eyes 2
Dir: Martin Weisz. US. 2007. 89mins. Hoping to wring more money from humans-vs-mutants battles to the death, The Hills Have Eyes 2 offers another round of dull gory fright scenes that neither push the horror envelope nor exhibit any noticeable ingenuity. Borrowing liberally from fear classics like Aliens and The ...
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Reviews
Shooter
Dir: Antoine Fuqua. US. 2007. 126 mins.Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg appears to be going more for box office gold than critical honours with Shooter, a handsome but seriously overblown action thriller from Training Day and King Arthur director Antoine Fuqua. Mashing up elements from the Rambo movies, TV action series ...
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Reviews
Elvis And Anabelle
Dir/scr: Will Geiger. US. 2007. 98mins. A warm-hearted and always smoothly-functioning depiction of small-town Texas life, Elvis And Anabelle is sweet-natured but lacks enough grit to push it beyond the DVD shelf. It's an offbeat love story, with a hint of the otherworldly about it, and the script and the ...
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Reviews
TMNT (TMNT)
Dir: Kevin Munroe. US. 2007. 87mins.Seventeen years after their cinematic debut, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles return with their sweetness and boyish tomfoolery intact. TMNT may substitute CG animation for the earlier films' live-action treatment, but the strongest ingredient remains the four reptiles' incorrigible charm, which easily outclasses a muddled ...
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Reviews
Reign Over Me
Dir/scr: Mike Binder. US. 2007. 125 minutes. Using the events of September 11 as a prism through which to refract one widower's swallowed anguish, writer-director Mike Binder's Reign Over Me is an astute, adult drama that grapples with issues of intervention and familial communication, and asks what is the socially ...
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Reviews
Blackbird
Dir/scr: Adam Rapp. US. 2007. 108 minutes. Screening in the Narrative Features Competition at Austin's SXSW Festival, this depressing film treads a well-worn path. Its familiar story features a 32-year-old heroin-addicted Marine veteran named Bayliss (Sparks) who meets another addict, a 16-year-old runaway from Detroit named 'Froggy' (Jacobs) at the ...
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Reviews
He Was A Quiet Man
Dir: Frank Cappello. US. 2007. 100 minutes. Screening in the Spotlight Premiere section of SXSW, He Was A Quiet Man is an excellent, unpredictable and often extremely witty film that is, alas, going to have a difficult time finding an audience. A dark comedy that is really quite comic but ...
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Reviews
The Prisoner Or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair
Dir: Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein. US, 2007. 72 minutes. Shown in the Spotlight Premieres section of SXSW Festival, The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair is a powerfully moving documentary about one Iraqi man's mistreatment at the hands of the US military in that infamous hellhole ...
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Reviews
Suffering Man's Charity
Dir: Alan Cumming. USA. 2007. 92 mins Suffering Man's Charity is one of those films that attempts to hide humourless and cruelty behind the generic label 'black comedy'. Instead of being funny, it is rather a relentless harangue, an assault of over-the-top acting that attempts to disguise or make up ...
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Reviews
Premonition
Dir: Mennan Yapo. US. 2007. 97mins. Unconvincingly folding together domestic drama with time-bending suspense and personal-stakes analytical thrills, Premonition represents Sandra Bullock's worst starring vehicle in a decade. Spare in design, detail and cogent thought, the film is a mock investigative thriller which unfolds over the course of one jumbled ...
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Reviews
Knocked Up
Dir/scr: Judd Apatow. US, 2007. 126 mins. In 2005, Judd Apatow scored big with the surprise hit, The 40-Year Old Virgin, which, with its novel combination of gross-out elements and old-fashioned, recognisably human emotion, earned critical plaudits and went on to do some $177m box-office world-wide. With his new film, ...
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Reviews
Sisters
Dir: Douglas Buck. US. 2007. 92 mins.When will filmmakers ever learn how risky it is to re-make a classic, especially when it's in the same language' Does it take a special form of hubristic death-wish to deliberately invite comparisons between your film and that of an acknowledged master of horror ...
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Reviews
Flakes
Dir: Michael Lehmann. US. 2007. 83 mins. Flakes starts well and full of pep, but is one of those 'high concept' indie films that fatally loses steam after the first 20 minutes, once the basic premise - dueling cereal restaurants, one a laid-back, funky hippie operation and the other an ...
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Reviews
The Lookout
Dir/Scr: Scott Frank. US. 2007. 99 mins. Opening Night Film at the SXSW Film Festival, The Lookout is the directorial debut of Oscar-nominated screenwriter Scott Frank (Out Of Sight, Get Shorty, Minority Report, The Interpreter and Little Man Tate). A somewhat uneven, but always engaging film, The Lookout is set ...
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Reviews
I Think I Love My Wife
Dir: Chris Rock. US. 2007. 94mins. It sounds like a joke: comedian Chris Rock and Louis CK, with who he collaborated on his edgy 1990s HBO TV series, working together again on an adaptation of Eric Rohmer's Chloe In The Afternoon. The laughs sound even more pronounced given that they ...
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Reviews
Becoming Jane
Dir: Julian Jarrold. UK-US. 2007. 120mins Fact proves just as charming as fiction in Becoming Jane, a beautifully crafted biography of Jane Austen that will hold an irresistible appeal to global audiences who swooned over big screen adaptations of Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Sense & Sensibility (1995). Charting the ...