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Latest reviews – Page 387
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Reviews
Witnesses (Les Temoins)
Dir: Andre Techine. France. 2007. 115minsTechine powerfully reasserts his status as one of European cinema's most adult film-makers in Witnesses, a complex, assured evocation of the mid-80s, when French society was first confronted with the reality of Aids. In a simple narrative framework - made a touch more complex by ...
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Reviews
Goodbye Bafana
Dir: Bille August. France/Germany/Belgium/Italy/South Africa 2007. 117 mins Denmark's double Palme d'Or laureate Bille August takes on one of modern historical cinema's holy grails, after a fashion: in its indirect way, GoodbyeBafana is nearly the Nelson Mandela story. But where he once scored with The Best Intentions, August's noble purpose ...
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Reviews
In Memory of Myself (In Memoria di Me)
Dir: Saverio Costanzo. Italy. 2007. 116 mins.Slow-paced and austerely beautiful, the second feature by Italian auteur Saverio Costanzo takes on a subject that seems inherently uncinematic: the crisis of faith of a young man who is studying to become a priest in a Jesuit seminary in Venice. And yet Costanzo ...
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Reviews
Hounds (Jagdhunde)
Dir: Ann-Kristin Reyels. Germany. 2007. 87mins.It's not easy to be cute and bleak at the same time, but Hounds, the debut feature from Ann-Kristin Reyels, pulls it off. An edgily tender coming-of-age story, it lays the acerbic social observation of Mike Leigh over the gritty provincial realism of the brothers ...
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Reviews
When Darkness Falls (Nar Morkret Faller)
Dir: Anders Nilsson. Swe-Ger. 2006. 135mins.A dark Swedish three-parter, When Darkness Falls makes up in gritty energy and social conscience what it lacks in structural cohesion. It doesn't so much weave together its three stories about how people deal when threatened; it simply runs with each one for 10 minutes ...
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Reviews
Eye In The Sky (Gen Zong)
Former Johnny To writer Yau Nai Hoi makes an astonishing genre film debut with Eye In The Sky. Slick, fast and at times even furious, it introduces a new directorial talent with considerable mastery of film language who should go far, even if his first work bears his master's imprint. ...
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Reviews
The Home Song Stories
Dir. Tony Ayres, Australia, 2007, 103 min.,With immigration dominating the headlines in Australia as well as in Europe and the US, The Home Song Stories is a period film that gives a twist on current news - a lively melodrama about a roll-with-the-punches beauty whose long march through marriages and ...
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Reviews
The Tracey Fragments
Dir: Bruce McDonald. Canada. 2007. 80mins.Canadian Bruce McDonald has moved in a new direction, forsaking gonzo humour for multi-image experimentation in this first-person portrait of an angry persecuted teenager that lurches between tactile realism and fantasy. McDonald (Road Kill, Highway 61, Hard Core Logo) will move beyond his core of ...
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Reviews
The Counterfeiters (Die Falscher)
Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky. Aust-Ger. 2007. 98mins. A serious contender for one of this year's Bears, even a Golden one, Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters retells the Nazi attempt to sink the Allied economy by flooding it with counterfeit money. The film successfully tackles two issues. The first is whether concentration camp ...
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Reviews
Tuya's Marriage (Tu Ya De Hun Shi)
Dir: Wang Quan'an. China. 2007. 92mins.Tuya's Marriage is a clever and witty tale of a practical woman searching for a reliable man in a remote part of China in the throes of growing pains. Director and co-writer Wang Quan'an reminds us in his third feature that this quest is as ...
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ReviewsThe Year My Parents Went On Vacation (O Ano Em Que Meus Pais Sairam De Ferias)
DIr: Cao Hamburger. Brazil 2007. 103 mins.
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Reviews
I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK
Frustrating, whimsical, baffling and yet utterly original, Park Chan-Wook's new feature seems designed expressly to alienate those who were turned on to the Korean director by his revenge trilogy - Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. This tale of a psychologically fragile girl who thinks ...
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Reviews
Music and Lyrics
Dir: Marc Lawrence US. 2007. 102mins. After dipping his toe in the murky world of satire with last year's American Dreamz, Hugh Grant retreats to conventional romantic comedy with Music And Lyrics, a bland, undemanding reunion with his Two Weeks Notice (2002) director Marc Lawrence. Grant's blithe spirit and eternal ...
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Reviews
La Vie En Rose (La Mome)
Dir: Olivier Dahan. Fr-UK-Czech Rep. 2006. 140mins.The biopic is a genre that the French film-makers have rarely shown much aptitude for, being the kind of (usually costly) project the British and Americans do better. But producer Alain Goldman and writer-director Olivier Dahan largely succeed with La Vie En Rose, a ...
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Reviews
Hannibal Rising
Dir: Peter Webber. US. 2007. 121mins. Call it audacious, foolhardy or both, but Hannibal Rising, the prequel about Hannibal Lecter's origins dispenses with the stylish suspense of Silence Of The Lambs and Red Dragon/Manhunter and the campiness of Hannibal to portray the cannibalistic serial killer as an avenging angel of ...
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Reviews
Finishing the Game
Dir: Justin Lin. US. 2007. 93mins. Following his foray directing the studio assignments Annapolis and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Justin Lin exhibits a warmer, more personal touch with Finishing the Game, a clever though very thin divertissement about filmmaking, Asian cultural stereotypes and the iconic representation of ...
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Reviews
King of California
Dir/scr: Mike Cahill. US. 2007. 93mins. A bittersweet comic fable, Mike Cahill's debut feature King of California navigates a quixotic emotional register perched between fantasy and delusion that imagines a sweetly anarchic world where adolescent desire for normality and adult hope for grandeur clash by night. It features a lovely, ...
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Reviews
On The Road With Judas
Dir/scr: JJ Lask. 100mins. US. 2006. In On the Road with Judas, novelist and television-commercial editor JJ Lask shows aptitude for making sense of a complex, multi-character narrative that in less sure hands would be chaotic and incoherent. However his achievement is more technical than emotional as beneath the Charlie ...
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Reviews
The Messengers
Dirs: Oxide and Danny Pang. US. 2007. 91mins. The studio debut of the gifted horror specialists Oxide and Danny Pang (The Eye , Bangkok Dangerous), The Messengers is a visually assured though dramatically flat ghost story about an endangered American family unaware their just purchased North Dakota farmhouse harbors a ...